Want an update on the Weekend at Bernie’s clown show that is W Social? No? Me neither, but here we are…

So before we start, let’s recount the whole dystopian raison d’être of these Davosian clowns: to be a EU®opean “alternative to X” that ­– cue the 1984 theme tune – verifies your identity to ensure that only “real people” are on it (real is what your government says it is).

Now, let’s fast forward to last week, when TikTok set up an account on W Social.

That’s nice, isn’t it? One surveillance capitalist lending their support to another? Kumbaya and all that. The only problem? (spoiler alert), it wasn’t TikTok. (Shocking, I know.)

The account, Identity Verified™ by EU X – sorry, W Social, was a spam account and immediately labelled as such by BlueSky moderators. (Don’t you love a “decentralised” system where a post on an EU server, accessed from another EU server, is moderated by our benevolent Big Brother in Trumpland, by the way? I know it just warms the cockles of my heart. So much sovereignty! But I digress…)

So @_elena calls them out (someone has to while @EUCommission is busy preparing for their honeymoon after expressing their undying devotion to W Social recently on every social platform¹):

https://mu.social/profile/elenarossini.com/post/3mqob7shxks2t

Anna Zeiter – W CEO, Stanford’s own, and ex-eBay executive (such sovereignty) – replies with this absolute zinger:

> “We are just verifying if some [sic] is a human and at least 18 years old. Users are then free to choose their own user name. This (human) user apparently chose the name TikTok.“ (https://mu.social/profile/anna.wsocial.eu/post/3mqoepm7m2k2z)

Read that as many times as you like until it really sinks in.

These incompetent clowns (dangerous competent clowns but incompetent clowns nevertheless) make people go through a ridiculous 13-step identity verification stage² and then… umm… you get to choose whatever identity you want.

🤡🤡🤡

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they’re incompetent. It would be worse if they were competent, given they’re a closed-source venture-capital-funded startup determined to prove your identity.

> “Yes we have a business model, it’s not a philanthropy, we are not a B corp, we actually want to make money.” – Anna Zeiter³

But, what I want to know is this: Why has @EUCommission embraced a proprietary, closed-source, corporate ghost town with 14,300 accounts, 90% of which have not posted even once (in other words, with only 1,259 accounts that have ever posted)⁴ when there is a thriving non-corporate fediverse with millions of active people on it.

Could it have anything to do with identity verification, surveillance, and control?

And if so, why can’t they even get that right?

Looking forward to seeing how long @EUCommission can drag the corpse of W Social around before people realise it’s dead.

Oh, and how does this make the whole “European alternatives” thing look? Not good. Not because there aren’t excellent European alternatives but because the folks at the commission are either too clueless or too corrupt to recognise and support them.

So, yeah, how’s your Monday going?

¹ e.g., https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/116770333053823108, etc.

² https://aseachange.com/@elena/statuses/01KVD55YBYVM3B46ACQTECDMT2

³ https://blog.elenarossini.com/the-untold-story-about-w-social-unconventional-beginnings-strategic-pitches-conflicting-signals/ (from the YouTube video that they since deleted. Nice transparency there, clowns.)

⁴ Run this script in Node 18+ to reproduce the numbers from their PDS yourself: https://codeberg.org/aral/gists/src/branch/main/wsocial-pds-stats.js Also see https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-a-broken-ghost-town/ and https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-fictional-metrics-and-the-beauty-of-open-data/

#WSocial #EU #sovereignty #socialMedia #socialNetworking #mastodon #fediverse #activityPub #ATProto #startups #EUCommission