What is ‘W,’ Europe’s attempt to replace Elon Musk’s X?

The Swedish-based “W” platform” is the latest in a series of new social media sites vying to replace US Big Tech companies.

Anatomy of a Franco-German tech misfire

As Europe debates how far to go in pivoting away from US Big Tech, a cloud initiative provides a cautionary tale.

How WEIRD is CHI?

Computer technology is often designed in technology hubs in Western countries, invariably making it “WEIRD”, because it is based on the intuition, knowledge, and values of people who are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Developing technology that is universally useful and engaging requires knowledge about members of WEIRD and non-WEIRD societies alike. In other words, it requires us, the CHI community, to generate this knowledge by studying representative participant samples. To find out to what extent CHI participant samples are from Western societies, we analyzed papers published in the CHI proceedings between 2016-2020. Our findings show that 73% of CHI study findings are based on Western participant samples, representing less than 12% of the world’s population. Furthermore, we show that most participant samples at CHI tend to come from industrialized, rich, and democratic countries with generally highly educated populations. Encouragingly, recent years have seen a slight increase in non-Western samples and those that include several countries. We discuss suggestions for further broadening the international representation of CHI participant samples.

WSocial could change everything - matlfb.com

In early 2026, the European Union announced its own Twitter-like platform called WSocial. The most surprising part is that it is expected to be a fork of Blu...

Prompting Science Report 4: Playing Pretend: Expert Personas Don't Improve Factual Accuracy

<span> <p><span>This is the fourth in a series of short reports that help business, education, and policy leaders understand the technical details of working w

Prompting Science Report 4: Playing Pretend: Expert Personas Don't Improve Factual Accuracy

<span> <p><span>This is the fourth in a series of short reports that help business, education, and policy leaders understand the technical details of working w

The Left Doesn't Hate Technology, We Hate Being Exploited

Techno-cynics are all just wounded techno-optimists.

Elena Rossini 🌈 (@_elena@mastodon.social)

#WSocial will open up their beta program today… and I have a SCOOP for you: it appears that they have quietly gone closed-source! This is ironic, considering that the @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu just unveiled their Tech Sovereignty Package, emphasizing the importance of #OpenSource. And yet they have migrated their main ATproto accounts to W Social - whose code can no longer be inspected! My full article - with a great analysis by @aral@mastodon.ar.al: 🔗: https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-public-institutions-and-the-theater-of-european-digital-sovereignty/ #FOSS #DigitalSovereignty #BigTech

Every tech product right now.

2.9K votes, 59 comments. 36M subscribers in the memes community. Memes! A way of describing cultural information being shared. An element of a…

W Social, Public Institutions and the Theater of European Digital Sovereignty

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.

EU praises open source for tech sovereignty — then backs W, a private for-profit microblogging platform

To fundamentally understand why it's strange the EU Commission is throwing its weight behind this new for-profit social platform, you need to understand what lies beneath.