Swedes’ Twitter Voice: Anyone, Saying (Blush) Almost Anything

If there is anything to be learned from the @Sweden experiment, a government initiative that entrusts the country’s Twitter account to a new citizen every seven days, it is that there is no such thing as a typical Swede.

The @Sweden program, known as Curators of Sweden, came about when the Swedish Institute and Visit Sweden, the government tourist agency, sought to develop a plan to present the country to the world on Twitter. They hired an advertising company, Volontaire. “Sweden stands for certain values — being progressive, democratic, creative,” Patrick Kampmann, Volontaire’s creative director, said in an interview. “We believed the best way to prove it was to handle the account in a progressive way and give control of it to ordinary Swedes.” The @Swedens are nominated by others — people are not supposed to put their own name forward — and then selected by a committee of three, including Mr. Kampmann. The qualifications are that they have to be interesting, Twitter-literate and happy to post in English. They are told not to do anything criminal, to label political opinions as their own and “not to make it sound like the entire Sweden feels that way.