Alternate social media platforms grew by leaps and bounds in the year following the Capitol riot, driven by conservative users’ gripes with Big Tech’s censorship and privacy policies.
Challengers to Facebook and Twitter, such as Rumble, GETTR, and MeWe, have each added millions of users to their platforms in the past year by promoting a focus on free speech and data privacy. The up-and-coming platforms say that social media giants have pushed users into their arms by silencing conservative views.
“The most important change in the social media world since the Jan. 6 attack is the role of censorship by Big Tech companies and consumers not trusting them,” said Mark Weinstein, founder and chairman of MeWe, an alternative social media platform that has been popular with independents and libertarians. “Anything Facebook doesn’t like, it takes down, and they’ve decided their wallets and surveillance capitalism are more important than our democracy and privacy — which we think are essential.”
Weinstein pointed to what he considers Facebook’s unfair double standards when it comes to content moderation, as well as its alleged harm to children, as central to users’ frustrations with the platform.
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Social media insiders say that alternative platforms have given those censored by Facebook and Twitter new ways of expressing themselves.
“Those voices that are no longer given a microphone by Big Tech have gone down the street to somewhere else where they do have a microphone,” said Adam Sharp, Twitter’s former head of news, government, and elections. “The whole reason they were censored in the first place is because that speech has some popularity and an audience. Those censored have a sense of disenfranchisement which fed into the anger of Jan. 6.”
MeWe has approximately 20 million users after adding over 10 million in the past year, while Parler has 15.5 million users, and GETTR, the platform started by former Trump spokesman Jason Miller last summer, has over 4 million users.
GETTR, which bills itself as free speech oriented and anti-cancel culture, announced earlier this week that it has had more than 500,000 new users join in the past few days since popular podcaster Joe Rogan joined on Sunday.
This marks the biggest spike in users the website has had since it launched on July 4 of last year.
Some alternative platforms such as Parler and Rumble have used the past year to make their websites immune from censorship or restrictions they’ve faced at the hands of dominant Big Tech companies. A handful of Big Tech companies, including Amazon, Apple, and Google, moved to take down Parler in January 2021, claiming it helped enable the Capitol attack.
Parler was founded in 2018 and billed itself as a platform that protects free speech. It has been popular with conservatives and was the most downloaded apps on Apple’s app store in November after the presidential election and again in January after the Capitol riot.
“Unlike some of our competitors like GETTR who use Amazon [servers], we are completely independent in terms of our business infrastructure,” George Farmer, the CEO of Parler, told the Washington Examiner. “We spent a lot of the past year building out our own independent cloud and data services, so it would be very difficult to deplatform us again.”
Farmer added that conservatives and free-speech enthusiasts have “been too blasé” about the ability of Big Tech companies to deplatform and censor content even outside of their own platforms because of their control over digital infrastructure.
Liberal groups critical of Big Tech say that platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have abused users’ personal data and failed to be transparent when it comes to their content moderation practices.
“It’s not surprising that people from across the political spectrum are looking for alternative platforms,” said Evan Greer, director of the digital advocacy group Fight for the Future. “But it’s essential that we demand alternatives that actually have better policies, more transparency, privacy, and security.”
Despite the growth that alternative platforms have had in the past year, social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter remain dominant and poised to continue controlling the conversation.
Facebook, which owns Instagram and WhatsApp, is the largest social media company in the world with billions of users worldwide, while Twitter has 330 million monthly active users.
It could take years, if ever, for alternative platforms to catch up with the Big Tech platforms when it comes to scale and reach.
“The challenge with any new social media player is it’s very hard to build a highly successful and scalable business when you’re mostly focused on one community,” said Sharp, the former top Twitter executive. “You’re not going to generate the scale and size of Facebook or Twitter with just conservatives or just liberals. You have to be a big open tent, and that’s hard to do while differentiating yourself.”
Instead, Big Tech challengers such as Parler and MeWe are betting big on creating a strong presence on Web3, a new iteration of the internet that incorporates decentralization based on blockchains.
The main feature of Web3 is to create a freer version of the internet where users can access websites and transport their data from service to service without Big Tech companies such as Amazon Web Services, Facebook, or Google stopping them.
Alternative platforms are hoping to draw users onto their websites by getting a jump start on Web3, a growing ecosystem that could form a significant chunk of online interactions in the future.
“Web3 for Parler is a very exciting move because we’ve suffered more than anyone else at the hands of Big Tech,” said Farmer, the Parler CEO.
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“If users can embrace the movement for decentralization of the internet, outside of Big Tech’s control, that’s wonderful, and we’re thrilled to be part of that movement,” said Farmer.
