Europeans set to launch an alternative to X. It’s called W

European organizations are about to launch their own social media platform, W, amid rising tensions with the United States.

The new platform, W, will require identification and photo validation to ensure that its users are both humans and who they claim to be, Danish news media outlet Politiken.dk reports.

The initiative to create the social media platform W is supported by an advisory board and former ministers and business representatives, primarily from Sweden.

Anna Zeiter, CEO of W, has told Bilanz.ch that W stands for “We.” Meanwhile, the first of the Vs that make up W stands for “Values,” and the second for “Verified.”

“The fact that W comes before X in the alphabet is certainly also a welcome coincidence,” Zeiter said.

W’s data will be hosted decentrally in Europe by European companies, and the platform will adhere to strict EU data protection laws.

“If political Brussels starts posting on W instead of X, we'll have already achieved a great deal,” she added in the interview for Bilanz.ch.

In her LinkedIn post announcing the launch of W, Zeiter emphasized that systemic disinformation is eroding public trust and weakening democratic decision-making.

“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,” she wrote.

However, previous user exodus from X to platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky had limited success, as some users lost their well-established network.

Who is Anna Zeiter, the CEO of W?

Zeiter is a Swiss privacy expert with a long history of working in tech. According to her LinkedIn profile, she spent over a decade at eBay, an American e-commerce company, where she oversaw data protection and artificial intelligence (AI).

She earned her PhD in law at the University of Hamburg and later studied at Stanford University.

W will be legally the subsidiary of “We Don’t Have Time,” a media platform for climate action, but the team is scattered across Europe, with offices in Berlin and Paris planned, Bilanz reports.

Washington Post reporter Ishaan Tharoor has shared a snapshot of the W’s introductory video, displayed at the debut event at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The announcement comes amid heightened tensions between the US and European countries.

President Donald Trump has just announced a fresh round of tariffs on several European nations for resisting his plans to buy or annex Greenland by military force. Greenland is part of the Kingdom of Denmark.

US social media companies have long accused European regulators of unfairly targeting them and imposing censorship.

The European Union, which has some of the most stringent regulations in the world, says it aims to protect users and increase the accountability of the platforms.

​Elon Musk’s X is at the center of a standoff between big tech and Brussels. After the platform was fined €120M ($140M) for breaching transparency rules under the European Digital Services Act, Musk called for the bloc’s abolition.

X is no longer a public square

A group of 54 members of the European Parliament called for European alternatives to the dominant social media platforms on Monday.

They argued that “X is no longer an open and balanced tool for political communication or journalism” after the company was bought by Musk.

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“It is not a ‘public square’ – it now resembles a deepfake pornography website, and a one-way broadcast system for Musk himself,” they wrote in an open letter to President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen.

X has drawn wide condemnation in recent weeks as the social platform was flooded with images of digitally undressed women and children generated by its chatbot Grok.

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