A 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 European AI models with their users' data (amongst other things).
ExploreA blog post explaining how the social network W Social is publishing as a record on the open social web the full names, nationalities and approximate birthdays of their verified users - who may be unaware this information is available for all to see, outside of the social network....
W Social has been experiencing major technical problems for over a week: it is effectively a ghost town, filled with thousands of new accounts that cannot use the platform....
W Social's tagline is "Trust Your Feed" but the company's landing page displays inflated engagement metrics - a misrepresentation that contradicts its own promise....
European public institutions are betting big on digital sovereignty and open source software. And yet they recently moved their Bluesky accounts to W Social, a private, for profit network owned by Swedish entrepreneurs that has quietly gone closed-source....
A deep dive into the origin story of W Social, an analysis of the strategic arguments they have been using to appeal to government officials, media companies and advertisers... and the discussion of conflicting signals they have been sending...
An article dispelling myths about W Social, the new European platform that aims to rival X: it is a fork of Bluesky that shares many similarities with Eurosky and requires government ID to sign up....
