W Social, Public Institutions and the Theater of European Digital Sovereignty

In the past few months I have unwittingly become an expert on all things W Social: the microblogging platform that is a fork of Bluesky and bills itself as Europe’s alternative to X, with identity verification “to fight bots and misinformation” and data hosted in Europe “to promote European digital sovereignty”. Why am I fascinated by this topic? I find the discrepancies between their public image and the reality behind the scenes truly striking.Over the course of the past few days I have received sensational information that no media organization has so far reported. So here we go, with another article about W Social on their big week, as they are set to open their public beta to their waiting list later today.But first: if you missed my previous articles on the topic, you can find them here:W Social - Elena RossiniA series of articles about the controversial social network W Social, a for profit company set up by Swedish entrepreneurs, who openly admitted they want to help train…