An alternative to Facebook
Facebook and Twitter have seen some users flee after booting President Donald Trump for inciting unrest and spreading false claims about election fraud. Some migrated to far-right friendly sites like Parler or Gab. Others joined a service that stands apart.
MeWe is a 4-year-old social media site positioned as an anti-Facebook that claims nearly 15 million members. It boasts a Privacy Bill of Rights and says it does not collect data on users. In the week ending Jan. 12, it was downloaded 787,000 times from Apple and Google’s U.S. app stores, according to Sensor Tower.
CEO Mark Weinstein says MeWe welcomes “everyone who is infuriated by their data being sold down the river” by Facebook’s so-called surveillance capitalism model.
Where are your members? How many people pay for services such as additional data storage and voice and video calling?
The members are 50% in North America, about 24% each in Asia and Europe and 2% in Australia. We’re translated into 20 languages. Currently 3% to 4% of members pay.
Who advises the company? What are its revenues?
Our advisory board includes Tim Berners-Lee, the World Wide Web creator, and Sherry Turkle, an academic expert on technology’s impact on humans. We have under 100 employees and had $1.2 million in revenue in 2020. Our revenue tripled from November to December.
Your terms of service explicitly prohibit hateful and inciteful content and say it is promptly taken down. But I’ve seen some incendiary postings.
Social media can get messy in times like these. And just like Facebook, Twitter, and other sites that also moderate, we are doing our very best. We are expanding our moderation team as rapidly as we can, and our members are helping. [Weinstein would not disclose the size of his moderation team.]
You say MeWe is not built, as its big competitors are, to serve up politically charged material.
We are fundamentally different by design from Twitter or Parler or Gab. Your news feed is purely and exclusively everything you choose to connect to. There is nothing injected into it by us or anybody else on the platform. We don’t have trending topics. We don’t have boosted content.
What is your stance on potentially dangerous speech and misinformation of the type that could, say, adversely impact public health?
We have absolutely no censorship for good people who follow our rules. We don’t care if you’re on the right or the left. That’s none of our business. Also, MeWe’s structural design prohibits the amplification [of misinformation]. Members do moderation for us, but a very deep violation can lead to immediate removal and being reported to outside authorities.