Digital Sovereignty | W Social | Europe | ID Management | IT Strategy

Don’t Follow Me on W Social

Not yet — sovereignty runs deeper than a mailing address.

Massive, unchecked bot networks have normalized toxic exchanges and manipulation, creating an urgent need for an alternative to platforms like X, or Facebook. This is exactly why the promise of a “European sovereign” platform like W Social is so compelling.

A sovereign European network supposedly guarantees a safer environment: better rules, verified human participants, and an escape from the toxicity of established platforms. I was genuinely excited to see this vision materialize, and I signed up for early access hoping to be one of the first in.

Then I got to identity verification, and I stopped.

The verification wall

To post on W, you verify through a companion app, W Identity: your passport plus a selfie. The right way to do this is by scanning the passport’s chip. The chip carries a cryptographic signature from the issuing country, making it impossible to fake the way a photo can. I like that they built it this way. This correct architecture is far superior to what many established apps do.

The problem: it failed. It failed on my ID card, and it failed on my passport. When the chip scan fails, the fallback is three photos instead: one of your face, one of your passport’s photo page, and a third of you holding that open passport page up next to your face. That’s not a modest downgrade — it’s a shift from a cryptographic proof that resists forgery to a stack of images that, if it ever leaks, cannot be reissued the way a password or even a physical passport can.

The verification wall — screenshots by Fabio Turel

So I closed the app. I actually believe W Social is acting in good faith; their privacy notice is more careful than most, featuring short data retention and on-device identity storage. However, I am unwilling to hand that data to a new company and simply hope that this failure mode never gets exploited.

Sovereignty is a layered concept

This experience highlighted the core problem with how we discuss digital sovereignty. The promise of a less toxic, European-backed alternative relies entirely on the assumption that geopolitical sovereignty is enough to protect us. But digital sovereignty isn’t one property a company has or doesn’t. It’s at least three separate layers, and “Made in Europe” only guarantees the first one.

1. Jurisdiction — where the company is legally registered and which laws govern it. This is the layer most “sovereign” branding is actually selling.
2. Infrastructure — what the platform runs on. W Social still relies partly on Bluesky’s own servers for search, feed generation, and content delivery, regardless of the passport its headquarters holds.
3. Technical execution — whether the systems actually work, chip by chip and country by country, for every passport they claim to support.

A company can win on the first layer and still fail on the third — which is exactly what happened to me.

I still want a European social network, and I believe in reliable identity verification as a powerful means to fight the deliberate, bot-driven disinformation manipulating our politics. Still, I am unwilling to let every new platform build its own verification pipeline from scratch and ask me to trust it with irreplaceable documents while the chip-reading tech catches up.

A better path already exists

There is already a better path taking shape: the EU Digital Identity Wallet, mandated under eIDAS 2.0. It is built specifically so you can prove you are a real, verified adult without handing over your passport number, birth date, or face to whoever is asking. Governments back it, and the EU audits it, completely removing reliance on a single company’s promises. Italy’s IT-Wallet has been live since December 2024, Switzerland’s swiyu is already in public testing, and every EU country has to offer this to its citizens by December 2026.

If W Social — or the next European platform like it — lets me verify through that wallet rather than through their own passport scanner, I will be first in line. Until then, I am still rooting for the idea. Just not with my passport in hand.