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Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

> Europe already has an ATproto social network - Eurosky - run by a non-profit foundation - Modal - that is building everything in the open, with full transparency, sharing all the steps in their development roadmap:

And weirdly, there was never a peep about this in the press - while the W Social launch was on national news and a bunch of high-profile EU politicians immediately joined. What's going on here?

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It means that marketers won over technical, factual people.

Not marketers, lobbyists

Probably marketers in this one. Marketers who know how to access politicians adn get invited to WEF.

The distinction: marketers know how to trick people, lobbyists bribe them.

That's not lobbyism, that's straight corruption. Lobbyism is, at least in theory, about convincing politicians

You would have to be exceptionally naïve to think that a good chunk of the "lobbying" done doesn't involve some sort of exchange of something of value.

In practice it's about bribing them or at least telling them personal gains. Like if you tell a politician he should support the war on Iran because he owns lots of oil stocks and they'll go up.

Marketing is telling a politician this app is the future of EU social chat so you need to be using it.

Its legalized bribes, basically pay to play these days.

Both? But yea, if you see the Advisory Board shown in an image lower in the article, you get the general idea.

Obama making an account on Twitter is a marketers' success. Twitter became popular first, politicians wanted to appear there second.

WSocial just went to politicians directly,it's not known by general public. Good news is, it rarely helps with commercial success

Not lobbyists, bribers.

NGOs are also lobbyists, and of the worse kind.

NGOs are not lobbyists.

Some NGOs lobby/employ lobbyists.

That’s not the same thing.

The marketers or the so far unnamed private investors.

Mastodon is also European

Mastodon is too secure and private for them.

They want people to get used to digital id.

This, a thousand times this. A network where mandatory government id is fine. Sure it maybe run by the shadiest sharks. But these are sharks that are pushing for the anti-internet, the anti-speech, the anti-privacy, and that's all that matters to the politicos of the world right now. https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-fictional-metrics-and...

Left right center: every politician is aligned on trying to put the Declaration of Indepdence of Cyberspace out for good. They all want to end un-attributed speech. In the US that means KOSA, and once again, bipartisan agreement comes only for screwing over speech, rights, freedom, and the citizenry. https://punchbowl.news/article/tech/house-kosa/

There’s no money or power to be had in providing free/libre tools to the masses

So there’s no chance a politician or marketer or anyone who has commerce as their primary motivation will spend any effort promoting it

The incentive is control.

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