- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
The Bilanz article that cybernews refers to is quite insightful. Here is a Deepl translation:
W Social wants to compete with Twitter
A new social network aims to make Europe more independent. In the leading role: Anna Zeiter from Zurich.
Marc Kowalsky, Bilanz, 19 January 2026
For eleven and a half years, she was a key figure at eBay, responsible for all non-American business and, as Chief Privacy Officer, also responsible for data protection worldwide at the internet auction house. Now Anna Zeiter (46), a resident of Zurich, is taking a career step that could have geopolitical consequences: Zeiter is to build a European response to X, formerly Twitter. This is another step in the efforts to free Europe, at least to some extent, from its technological dependence on the US. Because if the conflict over Greenland escalates, Elon Musk will flood X with US propaganda. The new network is called W Social. ‘The W stands for “We” and the big questions in investigative journalism: Who, how, what, when, where and why?’ says Zeiter. And in English, the first V that makes up the W stands for Values, the second for Verified. The fact that W comes before X in the alphabet is certainly also welcome.
Zeiter describes the new network as a ‘better version of Twitter’: ‘Positive, respectful communication should be encouraged.’ Users must identify themselves as human beings. This prevents fake accounts and excludes bots that serve as multipliers of false reports or propaganda. W Social also wants to address the filter bubble problem: if desired, a certain number of posts for each user can come specifically from a different opinion bubble. All data is hosted decentrally in Europe by European companies. And, of course, W Social is subject to strict EU data protection laws. The beta version is scheduled to go live in February at the latest, and W plans to open up to the general public at the end of the year.
Right from the start, W has had prominent supporters: its advisory board includes former German Vice-Chancellor and Swiss citizen Philipp Rösler, Sandrine Dixson-Declève, Chair of the Club of Rome, Cristina Caffara, Chair of EuroStack, the association of the 300 most important tech CEOs, and two former Swedish ministers. ‘If the political establishment in Brussels posts on W instead of X, we will have already achieved a great deal,’ says Zeiter. ‘And with EuroStack, we will bring the tech world on board.’ The initial funding comes mainly from Swedish tech investors, including Ingmar Rentzhog, CEO and founder of ‘We don’t have Time,’ a climate policy media and activism platform based in Stockholm. W plans to conduct a larger financing round later this year.
W will legally be a subsidiary of ‘We don’t have Time’ and thus also based in Sweden, but the team is spread across Europe: Chief Commercial Officer Johan Sundstrand, a successful serial entrepreneur, is based in London, the tech team is in Ukraine, and offices in Berlin and Paris are planned. Zeiter herself will remain in Zurich. After all, the German-born entrepreneur has already passed the Swiss naturalisation test. Now she is just waiting for the green light from the federal authorities.
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I don’t like this type of platforms but if it can help EU ban Twitter in the near future I’m all in.
Blocking Twitter and moving everyone to platforms with verification would be great for fighting disinformation and hate speech. I would just keep the platform open to browsing without an account so that you can still access information anonymously. If you want to publish something we should know who you are. And before anyone starts screaming, we will still have smaller platforms were you can stay anonymous. The idea should not be to identify everyone on the internet, only people that are actually trying to influence the public by posting on platforms with big audiences.
The new platform, W, will require identification and photo validation to ensure that its users are both humans and who they claim to be, Danish news media outlet Politiken.dk reports.
Fuck that.
I actually think that this might be a good idea to keep bot networks of the platform, as long as this info is not public.
Nothing prevents trolls from automatically creating 100000 new accounts, have them all follow 1 account and then just like and share their posts for visibility on either twitter or Facebook, to tell boomers that billionaires are great people. Neither Facebook nor twitter will block those fake accounts as long as they bring in ad money, or their goals don’t go against their owners interest.
“Give me 10.000 random images of diverse people’s faces and matching IDs.”
If the ID is indeed verified then you need matching faces, names, passport numbers and birthdays. Also you cannot sign up with an ID that has been previously registered, since the point of IDs is that they are unique. Passports even come with an expiry date, which limits the damage you can do with stolen data.
Why? We already got Mastodon as a European alternative.
What about a single instance in a federated system that has ID requirements. Might be a good idea and still allows interaction with anonymous or pseudonymous accounts.
Yeah, but Mastodon can’t be controlled by a singular entity.
For me and you, that is a feature. For them, that is a flaw.
i love the “only real validated people” part of this but i fear the implementation will be shite
Mastodon is often mentioned as an alternative, but it has its own problems. In my opinion, the biggest one is that there is no way to sort your feed like you can on Lemmy. A chronological timeline will always lead to quantity being prioritized over quality. That’s why newer users in particular only see boring stuff. If you bring this up, you’re guaranteed to get some Madison fan saying that Mastodon doesn’t want to be like Twitter, and especially doesn’t want to have an algorithmic feed. But then it’s not and cannot be an alternative.
And “Mastodon” is not a good name. The term “Fediverse” is better but inevitably leads to confusion about decentralization.
I believe the Mastodon instance should strengthen their individual branding instead. Don’t advertise “Mastodon” but advertise “feddit.org” instead.
While I agree with the second part of what you’re saying, it’s also worth noting that no social media platform in history has had a good name. Like, MySpace? Facebook? X? TikTok?
no social media platform in history has had a good name
I think Twitter and ‘tweeting’ actually is pretty clever naming. And to be honest, Facebook is a pretty understandable name too, if you look at where the name comes from and what it once was.
Not to mention W, a single letter that nevertheless takes ages to pronounce in most languages.
And is a pain for searching online. It’s fine if you want the website, not great if you’re looking for recent news
“takes ages to pronounce in most languages”
Which ones, other than English?
If I remember correctly, in French it’s “double v” (doo-ble veh), so about the same as “double u”. Japanese would get the name from English and twist it into “daburuyuu”. (I don’t know about “most” languages though)
“Dobbelt-V” in Norwegian. It is by far the most poorly named letter of our alphabet, though to be fair it’s also the most neglected one.
In order to avoid confusion from ambiguity in Spanish, calling it doble uve ['do.ble.'u.ße] or something similarly long is required.
Do they even have any tech expertise in their team?
Right from the start, W has had prominent supporters: its advisory board includes former German Vice-Chancellor and Swiss citizen Philipp Rösler, […]
Oof. sounds more like an “L” instead of “W”.
Cristina Caffarra (two “r”'s) is someone to explore though. See my Lemmy post about her.
My positive respectful communication takes place at Mastodon 🤷♂️
its advisory board includes former German Vice-Chancellor and Swiss citizen Philipp Rösler
Yeah, my interest totally evaporated. Rösler really has no good track record as a politican and his party was so unpopular that it went from being in the government to being voted out of the Bundestag. Interesting to see him pop up there, but I will stay with Lemmy/Mastodon
The best names are those you have to laboriously explain. /s
In Italian (where the letter “w” doesn’t exist) it could work: vuvu 😆
In German, it just sounds like a confused “whuh?”
I mean, W is even worse name than X and there is Mastodon. Easier to advertise that. You could even make each country to have its own instance idk, mastodon feels like much easier approach than creating new platform from scratch.
The thing with X is it at least has cool sound to it, kinda edgy maybe, but does sound cooler but W just doesn’t sound much authentic.
Willing to bet it’s like Truth Social’s beginnings and is just a fork of a federated microblog with every intention of federation wiped.
Sounds similar to https://www.trustcafe.io/en/About - at least the intentions. It’s a pity a new company is needed rather than supporting existing projects like Mastodon/PieFed etc. If it reduces the spread of oligarchs disinformation then it will be worth it IMO.
It would have been a pity had it been needed - thankfully it is not. This project either needs to connect to ActivityPub, or it’s just a huge waste of time. I suspect the latter.
Yeah, I think investing in an existing, federated FOSS instance is what’s needed. Not this.
🤦♀️
The new platform, W, will require identification and photo validation to ensure that its users are both humans and who they claim to be.
Anonymity on the web is at risk on multiple fronts (age verification mandates and discussions around banning VPNs come to mind) so this is probably not a good thing, but I can see the value in such a social network as long it’s complementary to the anonymous platforms we have today. Perhaps the closest thing to it we have today is LinkedIn.
Absolutely, I don’t think having non anonymous areas of the internet is necessarily an issue, so long as we also (can) provide plenty of non anonymous areas as well.
Anonymity has its downsides, and transparency has its advantages too, not just for the establishment.
It’s just important to keep fighting for and protecting the anonymous bits in parallel.
If they were serious about this, they’d join the Fediverse.
We simply don’t know that. I can’t find a website yet, so it is too early to make statements about their use of ActivityPub.
https://wsocial.eu/, though it could beneficially be confused with https://w-social.eu/.
There’s nothing on their site yet, just an empty promise and a broken setup. Not inspiring confidence.
Thank you. Also really ugly site.
Contrarian opinion here but I’m all for I’d verification in a social network and things. All other platforms like X, Facebook,… have gone downhill with bots and paid foreign actors. The same will happen to mastodon, lemmy, bluesky,… as well when they get bigger.
A hard to swallow pill but either we go down this way or we’ll continue to open Putin, Trump,… the back door to our democracy. Let’s hope it succeeds.
I wonder if a mix of instances could help. Some that require verification and some that don’t.
There will always be anonymous alternatives. That’s the nature of the Internet. With a platform like that, I would probably take views expressed there as a likely genuine statement, whereas I’ll treat statements on anonymous platforms as likely bot / malicious actor etc. activity. I think we are a bit naive to the fact how much outside influence and interference there is on public platforms.
