This undated photo provided by MeWe shows Mark Weinstein, CEO of MeWe. MeWe is a 4-year, full-featured social networking company, positioned as anti-Facebook. It is said that it does not collect data about its users and includes a Privacy Statement. In the last year, MeWe has doubled its membership to almost 15 million. (MeWe via AP)
This undated photo provided by MeWe shows Mark Weinstein, CEO of MeWe. MeWe is a 4-year, full-featured social networking company, positioned as an anti-Facebook. It is said that it does not collect data about its users and includes a Privacy Statement. In the last year, MeWe has doubled its membership to almost 15 million. (MeWe via AP)
BOSTON (AP) – Some users have fled Facebook and Twitter after platforms launched President Donald Trump and some of his confederates for inciting unrest and spreading false allegations about election fraud. Some have migrated to far-right friendly sites like Parler or Gab. Others have joined a service that aims to stand out.
MeWe is a 4-year, full-featured social networking company, positioned as anti-Facebook. It is said that it does not collect data about its users and includes a Privacy Statement. In the last year, MeWe has doubled its membership to almost 15 million. In the week ending January 12, it was downloaded 787,000 times from Apple and Google smartphone app stores in the US, according to SensorTower.
While Trump’s disappointment with Facebook has certainly helped, CEO Mark Weinstein says MeWe owes its rise to “everyone who is furious at their data being sold into the river” by surveillance capitalists.
Weinstein spoke to The Associated Press from his home in Southern California. This interview was edited for clarity and length.
Q: Where are your members? According to your ‘freemium’ model, how many people pay for services like extra data storage and video calling?
A: Members are 50% in North America, about 24% in Asia, 24% in Europe and 2% in Australia. Some are in South America, Brazil and Argentina. We are translated into 20 languages. Currently, 3% to 4% of our members sign up for the premium. I didn’t spend any money on marketing. All our growth is organic.
Q: What does your capital investment and income look like? Who is behind the company?
A: We have about $ 22 million from high net worth investors, and our advisory board includes Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web, and Sherry Turkle, perhaps the most highly regarded academic expert on the impact of technology on human beings. We have less than 100 employees and we achieved revenues of $ 1.2 million in 2020. Revenues increased by 300% from November to December.
Q: Your terms and conditions are explicit regarding the prohibition of hate speech and insist that it be removed promptly. But I saw incendiary language in the discussions. The Alethea Group reported similarly and apparently was taken down. How can you be sure that you are moderating the site properly, especially against the background of a growth momentum, do you say it has reached 20,000 new users per hour? How many moderators do you have?
A: Social networks can become messy at times like these. And, like Facebook and Twitter and other moderating sites, we do our best. We expand our moderation team as quickly as we can and investigate the reports of our members, who help us. (Weinstein would not disclose the size of his moderation team.)
Q: You say that MeWe is not built, as are its big competitors, to serve politically charged materials.
A: We are absolutely not an opinion chamber of one side or the other. By design, we are fundamentally different from Twitter or Parler or Gab. We are a social networking platform like Facebook, where family members and friends connect. Your news feed is purely and exclusively everything you choose to connect to. There is nothing injected into your news feed by us or anyone else on the platform. We have no fashionable subjects. We have no improved content.
Q: What is your position on potentially dangerous speech and misinformation that could have a negative impact on public health during a global pandemic?
A: We have absolutely no censorship for good people who follow our rules. We don’t care what you think, whether you’re right or left. It’s none of our business. Also, the structural design of MeWe prohibits amplification (misinformation). Members are moderating for us, but a very deep violation can lead to immediate elimination and reporting to external authorities. For others, a member may be placed “in prison” – temporarily suspended – and then a three-strike rule applies.
Q: You said in an 2019 op-ed song that you don’t think that splitting Facebook will solve the problem of competition on social media. Is that still your thinking?
A: Sharing Facebook would only create a lot of mini-Facebook. It does not solve the problem of supervisory capitalism.
Facebook has lobbyists around the world who influence legislation and government officials. And it doesn’t comply with the regulations anyway. Regulating Facebook more carefully will only serve to institutionalize supervisory capitalism, make competition more difficult, and legitimize their business model, which is indeed an illegitimate form of capitalism.
Pure capitalism is simple and simple, it delights your client, it builds a relationship of love and trust. Respect them and they will be your customer for a lifetime. Facebook has completely broken this link. Facebook is a marketing company. Facebook is a data company. I’m not a real social network. Their clients are advertisers, marketers and politicians. MeWe customers are its members.