Censors of the world unite. You now have your own social media platform made just for you. Not only is it going to be plain and boring, with no disagreement allowed, but it will be run by a lawyer, not an entrepreneur, which would be on brand. So, what is its name? ‘W.’
Jan 23, 2026 – 🇪🇺 New European social media platform “W” launches as alternative to X
Key features:
• Photo ID verification required
• EU-hosted data with strict privacy standards
• Backed by former eBay exec Anna Zeiter
• Aims to combat “systemic disinformation”
Currently in… pic.twitter.com/PHgY79M4Og— TechnologyDeck (@TechDeckNews) January 23, 2026
W is its name, not because W comes before X in the alphabet, though that’s what most assume when they hear this. The geniuses behind the Sweden-based X imitator say that because it takes two Vs to make a W, the two Vs in W stand for “values” and “verified.” The W itself is supposed to stand for “We.” That’s it, just “we.”
Names aside, you may like the platform since it’s from the Silicon Valley of the Nordic region, Sweden. If you like its meatballs and its fish, you’re going to love its restrictive approach to social media, comrade.
CyberNews reported that W is a legal subsidiary of the “We Don’t Have Time” media platform for “climate action.” It’s run by Anna Zeiter, a so-called “Swiss privacy expert with a long history of working in tech,” who is CEO.
She’s a lawyer who has a “long history of working in tech,” and her LinkedIn profile indicates that she worked for eBay for 10 years, where she was in charge of data protection and artificial intelligence (AI). She earned her Ph. D. in law at the University of Hamburg, and she attended Stanford University Law School.
So what kind of social media platform can you expect from a Swedish lawyer who believes in the religion of climate change? How about one that requires ID and photo verification to ensure that users are real people and that they are who they say they are? Also, the ID and photo validation systems will help the powers that be track you down more easily if they don’t like what you have to say. Or they can just cancel you remotely. Whatever works.
Danish news site Politiken.dk is reporting that, “The initiative is supported by an advisory board that, in addition to former ministers and business people primarily from Sweden, also includes one of the initiators of the so-called Eurostack initiative, Italian-British economist Cristina Caffarra.”
But don’t you worry, Zeiter said that the W platform will be hosted in Europe and will adhere to the oppressive EU data protection regulations.
“If political Brussels starts posting on W instead of X, we’ll have already achieved a great deal,” she said. In effect, she is describing nothing more than a European elitist echo chamber.
To illustrate just how second-rate her site will be, Zeiter announced the launch through a LinkedIn post. I’m just speculating, but this may be the first time LinkedIn was ever used to break news.
Zeiter posted, “We believe there is an urgent need for a new social media platform built, governed and hosted in Europe. With human verification, free speech and data privacy at its core.”
And by “free speech,” I think she means the platform is totally fine letting you post anything the platform’s operators approve. Beyond that, all bets are off.
W promises to be everything X is not. It will censor, it will be boring, it will not have Elon Musk, it will do what it’s told, and it will fail.
In December, Musk took issue with the EU over the European Commission’s fine of the X platform in the amount of about $140 million for alleged violations of the EU’s digital transparency rules. The EU has some of the strictest constraints on online speech in the world. It has justified this by saying it wants to protect internet users and increase the “accountability of the platforms.”
Even though that’s written in English, the translation is: The EU wants to control everything Europeans see online so that the people are not exposed to anything that might make the elitists look bad. But more importantly, it’s all about identifying and killing populism in its crib.
In an open letter, 54 members of the EU Parliament wrote that the X platform, “It is not a ‘public square’ – it now resembles a deepfake pornography website, and a one-way broadcast system for Musk himself.”
It’s worth noting just how much X and other major social platforms are driven by algorithms, so if you like cat videos, X will give you nothing but cat videos. If you like gambling, politics, or gardening, X will give you more of the same. So, for the EU Parliament’s perception to be that X is like a deepfake pornography site, it makes me wonder about the internet habits of these continental deviants.
For most people I know, X is a news and information feed.
Well, soon enough, Europe will have its own version of X called W, and soon enough, it will die a quick death. The EU will return to X when it has something important to say, ironically, because it knows X is the only platform that will let you say what you want, and X is the one with all the credibility. I think those two notions go hand-in-hand. Just don’t tell Europe that.
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