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.…