Comment by sparkling
1 day ago
Super shady.
The german public broadcaster gave them a 5 minute feature on yesterdays evening news, that felt more like a paid ad than journalism. The report made it sound like it is some kind of semi-official EU-endorsed project, but its just... a closed source, for-profit social network? I guess the folks behind it are just well connected in Brussels.
Thank you but no thank you.
The company is "W Social AB", meaning "aktiebolag" which in Swedish is what you in the USA would call an LLC or "joint stock company.
So they are 100% looking to monetize and turn a profit.
I wouldn't call it shady, but closed source, for-profit sounds accurate.
> what you in the USA would call an LLC
"Inc" is probably closer than "LLC". While an LLC is a type of joint stock company, it is a specific form with a pass-through tax structure and restrictions on foreign ownership. "Inc" signifies the more general form of corporation in the US.
Aktiebolag is the overwhelmingly most common company form in Sweden and similar to common corporation forms in many other countries. It's not the same thing as a US LLC, which is a strange entity that has pass-through taxation.
Which is to say, there's nothing particularly remarkable about it being an Aktiebolag. It would be more remarkable if it wasn't.
You can have an "open" non profit, that is actually closed and is working to turn into a for profit...
so those distinctions dont seem to count much nowadays
Where is this possible? In the US, it is impossible. Non-profit's do not have owners, so they cannot be sold or changed to for-profit ones, so there are only two ways for a non-profit to "turn into" a for-profit:
* sell non-profit's assets to a for-profit company (so it's not turning into a for-profit company, and ownership of the non-profit can never be sold since it's not owned by anyone that can approve the sale, there are no shares, etc.) This is only legal if sold at fair market value. So the for-profit can't just take the IP, equipment, land, etc. It has to buy it at what anyone else would buy it at. It also has to be approved of by the state's government. Then the proceeds of the sale have to be transferred to another non-profit.
* form a for-profit subsidiary, which is still controlled by the non-profit. And the for-profit is owned by the non-profit, so the profits flow upward to the non-profit to be used to support the non-profit's agenda.
Either way, the non-profit cannot become a for-profit, and it takes corporate governance shenanigans (like the bullshit happening with OpenAI) to even approximate this. Essentially, it requires corruption and a non-profit board that is unaccountable to its stakeholders.
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Saw that interview, too. Biggest red flag to me was the claim, that they would use the mandatory id-document only to initially verify your'e not a bot - then discard it and they would "not store anything". Very hard to believe.
Why is that hard to believe? Plenty of systems work that way today. Holding on to that kind of information is a liability.
The way verification works requires sharing unique identifiers that a government can always trace back to the real identity. It is not clear whether these identifiers are retained, but I believe it is partially necessary to allow for "decentralization"
Yes, absolutely. No argument on that. What I meant is, I find it hard to trust them on that claim:
>we don't store anything except an encrypted token to prevent s.o. from opening multiple accounts. Authorities will not be able to identify users.
The current political climate in Germany is quite the opposite: Less anonymity. More access for authorities. So why this wave of support from politics?
I really would not mind to be wrong, though.
But Elena Rossini points out a lot of things in her 3 posts that confirm my skepticism.
Link to the interviews from german tv which I'm referring to[0]. Not sure if that helps.
[0] https://www.zdfheute.de/politik/deutschland/w-social-nachric...
not a single big corporation throws away your identity documents, they are very valuable
> The report made it sound like it is some kind of semi-official EU-endorsed project, but its just... a closed source, for-profit social network?
This is so stupid. It’s really like truth social. Having a private company with closed source pretending to be open and sovereign (whatever that means), adding ID verification by scanning your passport, it’s like.. gasoline for conspiracy theories. They’re so incredibly tone deaf. It’s like being back in the early 2000s when the older generation didn’t understand the internet. But it’s 2026…
Just skip the extra steps of putting social media makeup on a centralized mouthpiece, and make it an official EU site with broadcast only comms. Like public announcements and the like. That would at least serve some value. You can’t have both the social part and the control of the narrative.
> They’re so incredibly tone deaf.
What more do you expect from German and EU leadership?
>Just skip the extra steps of putting social media makeup on a centralized mouthpiece, and make it an official EU site with broadcast only comms. Like public announcements and the like.
Yeah but then nobody would ever read it. Which is why EU leaders want to coerce private platforms that are already highly successful with the public be their mouthpieces.
Germany's own government had dozens of meetings in secret with Google in order to discuss censorship. https://dailysceptic.org/2026/06/08/google-met-top-german-go...
Indeed a very odd sight between WC matches. I don't normally watch much TV, but I think this warrants further investigation and inquiry.
No mention of long-term stake of EU in ActivityPub platforms either, as if W would be our savior.
Public broadcasters in .de and .at have generally become very shady. To me it seems they dont have to pretend to do good journalism anymore, because they are financed by a mandatory fee per household anyway. It started to be very visible during COVID times. Unfortunately, since then, it only got worse.
>they are financed by a mandatory fee per household anyway
That pisses me the fuck off as well. Not only is it forced coercion to pay for state propaganda, not only are their fees higher than what the brits pay for the BBC, they also don't produce any valuable IP for all that money, like the BBC does (Dr. WHo, Top Gear, etc).
Nobody managed to convince me that it's not a scam and jobs program for the politically connected people to hire themselves, their friends and their family.
And probably stuffed with tax money. As usual.