Last week, fifty-four Members of the European Parliament signed a letter addressed to the Commission President Ursula von der Leyen calling for European alternatives to dominant social media platforms. This was in light of a recent scandal where people were able to use Grok, the AI on the social media platform ‘X’ (formerly Twitter), to create non-consensual sexual imagery of other users. Women and children were unsurprisingly the main victims. There is also evidence that platforms like X have been used to amplify far-right narratives in Europe, acting as vectors for election interference.
Another development was the announcement of ‘W’ as a European alternative at the World Economic Forum in Davos. While little is currently known about the initiative, early indications suggest it will build on the ATProtocol, the same protocol underpinning Bluesky, as well as an existing effort to develop ‘sovereign’ European infrastructure—Eurosky.
These moves are part of a larger concern around “digital sovereignty”: wanting more control over the digital infrastructure that people and institutions use. The Trump administration has previously threatened economic retaliation if the EU chooses to enforce its digital rulebook that could address the power of these platforms. A structural reliance on non-EU platforms, coupled with a deteriorating transatlantic partnership, has made it clear that the EU’s ability to enforce its norms has been significantly compromised.
The concern around control is not confined to Europe. The TikTok sale in the United States further underscores how these platforms are increasingly seen as instruments of geopolitical influence and potential threats to sovereignty, including by the American administration.
What is the ‘alternative’?
The push towards European alternatives raises broader questions about what they are meant to achieve, beyond being hosted in Europe. While it is likely an improvement if democratic institutions could enforce their norms without the threat of triggering a trade war, jurisdictional competence alone may be insufficient.
The MEPs’ letter and the announcement of W gesture toward, but do not fully articulate, how they intend to respond to a more fundamental problem—one that simply housing these infrastructures in the EU would not fix. Contemporary platforms are based on a business model of surveillance-driven advertising. The algorithms that shape what we see are optimized for maximal engagement, creating a structural incentive to keep users hooked. Emulating the psychological mechanics of a slot machine, these systems profit from amplifying the most emotionally charged content.
This feature (not a bug) has been frequently weaponized by well-resourced actors to launch coordinated campaigns of influence and harm. This has taken the form of interference in democratic processes worldwide, along with the amplification of harmful content, often targeting minorities. Alternatives that do not address these structural incentives risk reproducing the same harms.
We have previously written about how decentralized and federated platforms offer credible pathways towards building alternative social media infrastructures. Mastodon and other platforms on the ActivityPub protocol—as well as initiatives such as Blacksky and Eurosky, on the ATProtocol—are examples grounded in interoperability and credible exit, giving users greater agency over their online environments.
These alternatives disaggregate and unbundle the different elements of a centralized platform, such as feed curation, moderation, and hosting data. This creates the opportunity to experiment with algorithms that follow different logics: from alternative revenue models that aren’t premised on surveillance, to non-commercial, public-interest algorithms, potentially provisioned by public institutions, independent curation services, or trusted media organizations.
Building these alternatives should also go hand in hand with advocacy to unbundle the offerings of dominant platforms, using the levers available under the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act. This unbundling may be crucial to enable safer and more inclusive alternatives to emerge.
Safety is a Public Function
The letter from the MEPs also points to what is truly at stake: the safety of people, especially women and minorities, and the integrity of democratic processes. It highlights the nature and magnitude of the threats that ‘European alternatives’ must be resilient against if they are to be viable at scale.
If the way forward is alternative infrastructures on the open social web, with Mastodon, Eurosky, or W, this will also require building alternative trust and safety mechanisms that are robust, well-funded, and can operate across unbundled infrastructures.
This includes, for instance, mechanisms for coordination related to inauthentic behaviour across infrastructures that follow the same protocol, as well as across protocols. Cross-platform abuse is not a novel phenomenon, but as tooling develops that enables communication across protocols, it also amplifies the potential for harm. Centralized platforms like X are able, in principle, to develop internally coordinated responses to such threats, although they have demonstrably failed to do so successfully. For the open social web, trust and safety will require coordinated responses between disparate actors.
It might include ensuring that moderation work—currently, in the context of Mastodon, largely volunteer-based—has access to funding both to develop appropriate tooling and to sustain the work itself. It might also mean that (‘European’) alternatives on the ATProtocol (like ‘W’) need to build out alternative moderation infrastructure, without which they remain reliant on moderation provisioned by Bluesky PBC, an American company.
Public funding can play an important role in ensuring that these mechanisms, which also engage critical questions about free speech, are not solely shaped by commercial incentives. Like the provision of roads and bridges that facilitate communication and exchange, assuring the safety and integrity of the digital public square should be understood as a public function.
Calling for European alternatives entails more than building new platforms made in Europe. It requires a stronger push for interoperability and the unbundling of dominant platforms, enabling users and institutions to have meaningful choice between services. It also requires building out trust and safety infrastructures suited to decentralized and federated environments, so that these systems can function as genuine alternatives at scale. Finally, it calls for public funding to ensure that safety infrastructures and algorithmic curation are not captured or shaped entirely by commercial logics.
The current focus on digital sovereignty can be a rare opportunity to build momentum around alternatives to dominant social media platforms. But these must represent true alternatives, grounded in the ethos of safe, inclusive, public squares that prioritize democratic exchange over maximal engagement.
