Elena Rossini 🌈 (@_elena@mastodon.social)

Elena Rossini 🌈 (@_elena@mastodon.social)

Do you remember the surprise announcement of a new social network in Davos this past January? Something that promised to be the "first" European social network? Its name is #WSocial and it's a fork of #Bluesky. Its founders have ties with European politicians - but there is no official involvement by the EU. You wouldn't know any of this from media reports because they all rehashed their talking points. So I wrote a post about it, dispelling some myths: https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-uncovered-the-reality-behind-the-hype/ #OpenWashing

Elena Rossini 🌈 (@_elena@mastodon.social)

Attached: 2 images Dear Fedi friends, Apologies for another toot about #WSocial but I am genuinely shaking right now. The @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu and its president Ursula von der Leyen have recently migrated their ATproto (Bluesky) accounts to W Social. I cannot fathom why they would pick a private enterprise whose leaders didn't even have ATproto accounts 3 months ago... and who are so open to having their users' data mined to train European AI models. My articles on them: 🔗 : https://blog.elenarossini.com/tag/w-social/ Wow. Just wow.

The Untold Story About W Social: Unconventional Beginnings, Strategic Pitches and Conflicting Signals

A deep dive into the origin story of W Social, an analysis of the strategic arguments they have been using to appeal to government officials, media companies and advertisers... and the discussion of conflicting signals they have been sending

The Untold Story About W Social: Unconventional Beginnings, Strategic Pitches and Conflicting Signals

A deep dive into the origin story of W Social, an analysis of the strategic arguments they have been using to appeal to government officials, media companies and advertisers... and the discussion of conflicting signals they have been sending

DavidB (@david.eurosky.social)

"But why so much hostility?" Because WSocial has been dishonest since day one. The first time I heard of you, it was an ad saying that there was no European social media. Which was your first lie of a long series. "We're building a new social media." Another lie, you're a fork of Bluesky. And so on.

W Social: Key Allegations & Answers - Alt Text

October 13, 2026 4:46 PM GMT

New York Times Accused of Running AI-Generated Article

People are speculating that an essay published in the New York Times' "Modern Love" was AI-generated. What's definitely real? AI paranoia.

W Social uncovered: the reality behind the hype

An article dispelling myths about W Social, the new European platform that aims to rival X: it is a fork of Bluesky that shares many similarities with Eurosky and requires government ID to sign up.

Data Feminism for AI

Attacks on women and trans people are not happening in a vacuum. Communications scholars W. Lance Bennett and Marianne Kneuer recently argued that we are witnessing the intensification of "illiberal public spheres" around the world (Bennett and Kneuer, 2023). These are characterized by a set of anti-democratic communications tactics that include the denigration and exclusion of minoritized people, targeted attacks on the press and political institutions, and transgression of norms of civil discourse. Such tactics are enabled and amplified by the social media platforms owned by Big Tech, whose business model elevates attention above all other metrics, such that they profit richly off extremism, threats, spectacle, and lies. The success of this corporate partnership with right-wing extremism is evident in the proliferation of book bans (Magnusson, 2024), the demonization of DEI and critical race theory (Crenshaw, 2022), and mob tactics to doxx, intimidate, misrepresent, and otherwise silence people that study misinformation, speak out against racial and gender violence, or rule against insurrectionists (Edmonds, 2024). At the same time, we have seen the continued work of feminists, including Latin American, Indigenous, and abolitionist feminists in the US and globally, doing the work of imagining alternate worlds (Cullors, 2021; Davis, 2022; Ricaurte, 2019; Simpson, 2017). This paper represents our own first attempt to imagine a more equitable, sustainable, feminist world for AI research.

‘There’s a Value in What We Produce Because We Feel – and an AI Chatbot Can’t Feel’

Byline Times' Editor in Chief meets Kate Devlin, Professor of AI and Society at King’s College London, to explore how relationships with AI companions aren’t particularly new, why she believes the under-16s social media ban is flawed, and why human creativity can't be matched