European social media newbies step forward as users drift from X | Euractiv

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Photo: Alicia Windzio/dpa (Photo by Alicia Windzio/picture alliance via Getty Images)

A wave of European-owned social networks is gaining attention as politicians and users across the continent look for alternatives to billionaire Elon Musk’s increasingly controversial platform X.

Since Musk’s takeover of the social media service formerly known as Twitter in 2021, concerns over disinformation have fuelled unease among many Europeans who once relied on the platform as an information network and a central forum for public debate.

This growing sense of unease has been compounded by recent French and EU investigations into child sexual abuse material apparently circulating on the platform.

But X is not alone in sparking concerns. Other social media giants are facing EU scrutiny over their online governance: the European Commission has opened several investigations into platforms under the Digital Services Act (DSA) – spanning concerns such as disinformation and election security, product safety and illegal content, and child protection.

Most recently, Meta’s Instagram and Facebook were preliminarily found by the Commission to have failed to prevent under-13s from accessing the services, contrary to their own usage terms.

New entrants are now seeking to capitalise on brewing discontent and a sense that something’s rotten at the core of Big Tech’s social offerings. Sweden-based W Social, unveiled at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, is preparing for a beta launch in Brussels in June, while Croatian platform eYou publicly announced a beta rollout earlier this month, after 50,000 people signed up to its wait list.

Both are betting that European users are increasingly reluctant to remain on X, still the toxic poster-child for antisocial media platforms.

The new EU-based alternatives are promoting themselves as privacy-preserving, stressing European ownership and highlighting independent fact-checking standards – jockeying to position themselves as distinctly different from a US-dominant social media space whose owners have never been big on privacy. And as Big Tech seeks to curry favour with the Trump administration, the social media giants don’t seem very interested in facts either.

Yet breaking into the market will be difficult. Established platforms – including X, Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok – continue to benefit from powerful lock-in effects, creating steep barriers for newcomers hoping to win over users at scale.

Moreover, the European social media ecosystem is already crowded: W and eYou join existing regional players such as Mastodon, Eurosky and Monnett.

Locked-in

The biggest challenge for new entrants is the network effect of existing major social media platforms. The fact that many use a service because that’s what everyone else uses creates challenges for those seeking to build interactions outside dominant platforms.

This isn’t an accident. Locking in users is a "strategy" of dominant platforms, Jean Cattan from the think tank the Future of Technology Institute (FOTI) told Euractiv.

Mainstream services like Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn work to discourage off-platform interactions, plug-ins or data portability, including with rival social media platforms, because keeping users inside their own walled garden is a “core" tactic for attention farming-focused business models, he explained.

To try to work around the lock-in challenge, social media platform W is joining the AT protocol – an open-source framework that Bluesky is also built on – which has about 40 million users worldwide and 10 million in Europe.

"We are not starting from scratch,” Anna Zeiter, co-founder of W, told Euractiv.

By joining the AT protocol, she said the service can "start with a very solid basis" for attracting existing AT users – including from Bluesky and Eurosky – which have already pulled in a number of politicians.

Zeiter said W is offering a “third” alternative for users – i.e., in addition to Bluesky and Eurosky – and is planning to roll out additional functionalities, which she suggested will make it "more interesting" to join.

eYou’s co-founder Grégoire Vigroux, meanwhile, is eyeing organic growth, with the budding service focusing its marketing efforts on offering a European alternative.

"If you look at the top 50 largest social media apps, none of them is European,” Vigroux told Euractiv.

eYou said that it will launch with "real-time fact-checking within the feed, transparent and editable algorithms”, per a press statement shared with Euractiv, as well as specifying that "users can modify their own feed settings to maintain control over the algorithm”.

X-odus

Last week, several German political parties announced...