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Comment by pocksuppet | Hacker News Reader

W Social felt extremely shady since their first advertisement on HN.

Also, for all their talk about human verification, I have 6 accounts under different names :)

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.

And probably stuffed with tax money. As usual.

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.

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.

The comment you've replied to seems to be referring to OpenAI.

> 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.

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.

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"

not a single big corporation throws away your identity documents, they are very valuable

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...

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 have to pay an extra tax for receiving 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 they get from us, like the BBC does (Dr. WHo, Top Gear, etc). And in UK only people with TV have to pay whereas every household in AT has to pay regardless if you have a TV or not.

Nobody managed to convince me that the mandatory austrian broadcast fee is not a massive scam and a jobs program for the politically connected people to hire themselves, their friends and their family into insanely lucrative public sector jobs with golden benefits on the taxpayer's expense.

> 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...

The name is terrible too.

it's actually a double-v as in "the vvitch"

I thought it was a reference to the Weimar Republic.

Yeah, based on the people and organizations moving there, RedSky would be more appropriate.

Are you alluding to the association of "W" with George W Bush?

Not sure that's really a thing outside the USA. And as far as I heard that reference, it was always pronunced "Dubya" not "Double-You"

this is sarcasm, right?

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