W Social is TruthSocial with a European accent.

There's a new European social network called W Social . It launched at Davos in January 2026, is backed by Swedish investors and former ministers, run by ex-silicon valley execs , and is positioning itself as the trustworthy, privacy-respecting, European-values alternative to Twitter. It is also, in most of the ways that matter, TruthSocial for 0the Left Centrists and Liberals.

Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

The Same Play, Run Twice

When Donald Trump launched TruthSocial in 2021, his team needed a social network fast. So they took Mastodon , a free open-source platform built by a community of volunteers, stripped out the branding, and relaunched it as their own.

They didn't build anything. They didn't invent anything. And crucially, they initially claimed the code as proprietary, in direct violation of the open source licence that Mastodon is published under. It took a legal threat from Mastodon's founder to force them into minimal compliance. TruthSocial backed down.

Mastodon issues 30-day ultimatum to Trump's social network over misuse of its code | TechCrunch

Former President Trump's new social network might be in hot water before it even launches. Mastodon, a free social media framework, alleges that Truth

W Social are running that same playbook by building on AT , the open protocol developed by Bluesky, which is also free (as in beer and speech) open-source community infrastructure.

Online sleuths discovered early on that W Social's staging site was essentially a Bluesky sign-in page, and that their test server was openly advertising itself as an ATProto Personal Data Server. When confronted with this, W Social didn't come clean. They quietly updated their messaging to praise the protocol once the story was already out.

Two closed platforms. Two open source projects. Two cases of building on community infrastructure while obscuring that fact for as long as possible.

For a period, W Social's code was publicly available on GitHub . They put it there voluntarily. A signal that ✌️we're part of this community, we're building in the open, we share your values✌️. Then, with no announcement and no explanation, the repository was deleted.

Not deprecated. Not redirected. Deleted.

As Aral Balkan of the Small Technology Foundation put it

The standard practice is to deprecate the old repo and put up a message telling people where the new one is. Not delete it.

The Ideology Is Different. The Structure Isn't.

TruthSocial wraps itself in the language of free speech, anti-establishment populism, and fighting Big Tech censorship. W Social wraps itself in the language of European digital sovereignty, verified truth, and privacy. These are not the same politics. But they are of a similar nature.

Both platforms identified an audience that felt alienated from mainstream social media. Both position themselves as principled alternatives. Both built on open source community infrastructure while simultaneously obscuring that fact. Both are controlled by a small group of wealthy well-connected people with clear political ambitions.

W Social's advisory board includes silicon valley execs, and senior political figures . The platform was unveiled not in a community forum but at the World Economic Forum in Davos: an event not typically associated with grassroots digital activism.

None of that makes W Social evil. It does however make the "this is for the people" framing worth scrutinising.

Why This Matters Right Now

This would be an interesting hypothetical if it stayed theoretical. It didn't. In June 2026, the European Commission, its president Ursula von der Leyen, the European Central Bank, and ECB president Christine Lagarde all migrated their ATProto accounts from Bluesky's servers to W Social's servers.

Official EU institutional data, moved to a private, for-profit, Swedish-incorporated company, one that had, the very same weekend, quietly deleted its public source code repository. The institutions that moved may not have known. That's arguably more alarming than if they had.

All of this just days after the European Commission launched the Tech Sovereignty package to strengthen Europe's digital autonomy and resilience.

We cannot afford to depend on others for the technologies that keep our hospitals running, our energy grids stable and our services secure. This is about protecting our citizens, defending our interests and making our own choices. Europe has the talent, the research excellence, the industrial base and the Single Market. Together, we must turn these strengths into technological sovereignty.

— Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen

There are legitimate alternatives

If European digital sovereignty is the actual goal, not just the branding, then Eurosky exists.

0Eurosky is a non-profit ATProto network being built in public, with full transparency, by a foundation called Modal . Unlike W Social, it has not launched at Davos to attract political cover. Unlike W Social, its development is being done in the open, in collaboration with the ATProto community. Unlike W Social, it is not a subsidiary of a for-profit media company controlled by investors.

It is slower moving. It is less glamorous. It has dad-joke-level marketing. It has not signed up any former vice-chancellors to its advisory board.

It is also the real thing.

Considering moving to W?

European isn't a synonym for ethical. Davos doesn't mean grassroots. W Social is what happens when the establishment decides again that it wants its own internet: it finds the nearest community-built toolkit, rebrands it, performs openness long enough to land institutional credibility, then closes the door. The users become the product. The community becomes the unpaid resource. The mission statement becomes the marketing. Every platform that has ever done this looked like W Social at launch.

The internet doesn't have to keep working this way. The proof is already out there. @eurosky.social , @blackskyweb.xyz (by @rude1.blacksky.team ) and the independent builders across the #ATProto ecosystem are constructing something the establishment can't replicate: community infrastructure accountable to the people who use it, because those people are the same people who are building on it.

No VC insiders looking for an exit. No political board to serve. No gap between what the platform says it is and what it actually does. That's what sovereignty looks like when it isn't a lazy rebrand. Systems built for the public, controlled by the public, answerable to nobody else but the public. That's an internet worth building.

Now what?

Sign up to Eurosky or Blacksky or any of the authentic independent social internet providers out there in the atmosphere .

—

Disclaimer ⚠️

This article represents my personal opinions, commentary, and conclusions formed through independent research using publicly available sources. Any characterisations, interpretations, or inferences are presented as opinion, not as statements of objective fact. Readers are encouraged to review the referenced materials and draw their own conclusions.

—

Huge thanks to @elenarossini.com for her incredible journalism about W Social in recent weeks.

W Social - Elena Rossini

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).

Elena Rossini ⁂ (@elenarossini.com)

Italian filmmaker, media critic and Fediverse + FOSS advocate living in Paris, France. My main social media accounts are on the Fediverse; all my links: https://elena.social