MeWe, an upstart social media company founded on a "Privacy Bill of Rights," said that more than 2.5 million users downloaded its app in a single week as criticism of social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter ramped up after many companies banned Donald Trump from their services after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The ad-free network said that it has 16 million members — double the number of users who had signed up in June 2020 and continuing a trend of doubling its membership every year for the last three years.
"People all over the world are leaving Facebook and Twitter in droves because they are fed up with the relentless privacy violations, surveillance capitalism, political bias, targeting, and newsfeed manipulation by these companies," MeWe spokesman David Westreich told the Washington Examiner. "MeWe solves these problems."
Founder Mark Weinstein launched MeWe in 2012 as Sgrouples. Currently ranked No. 13 on the Apple App Store's most downloaded social media apps, the platform has been called "an alternative social networking site," and the company has branded itself with strongly anti-Facebook language. On Monday, MeWe was the No. 2 downloaded social media app on the Google Play Store.
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The platform's information page said that it was designed "to go head-to-head with Facebook and restore decency, privacy, and respect for social media users." MeWe doesn't rely on targeted advertising and said that users "have full control over your newsfeed and the order of how posts appear."
But because of the social media platform's less-stringent process of moderating and censoring content compared to other mainstream sites, MeWe, like Parler, in recent years has attracted conspiracy theorists such as anti-vaxxers who have been banned from other sites.
Weinstein has said that it was "not my job to censor good, law-abiding citizens" and that "there's nowhere in our terms that says you may not post fake news."
But while Weinstein acknowledges the role conservatives and Trump supporters have played in boosting MeWe's user base, he said that the app owes its growth to "everyone who is infuriated by their data being sold down the river" by surveillance capitalists.
Weinstein said that MeWe's "structural design prohibits the amplification [of misinformation]" because "there is nothing injected into your news feed by us or anybody else on the platform."
"We are absolutely not an opinion chamber of one side or another," Weinstein said. "We are fundamentally different by design from Twitter or Parler or Gab. We’re a social media platform like Facebook, where family members and friends connect. Your news feed is purely and exclusively everything you choose to connect to. … We don’t have trending topics. We don’t have boosted content."
MeWe also might not have the same content moderation as sites like Twitter or Facebook, but it does have "an outstanding Trust and Safety Team that works hard every day to proactively investigate and remove [terms of service] violators," Westreich said.
"The MeWe team is vigilant about keeping MeWe safe and has partnered with Internet Watch Foundation, Sift Science, and Arkose Labs in order to stop known bad actors at the door and find them if they’ve gotten inside," Westriech added. "Due to recent rapid membership growth, the company is currently expanding its Trust and Safety Team and adding new tools to help moderators find and remove TOS-violators."
