MeWe CEO Mark Weinstein explains how his platform plans to be more private

Kyle Chua

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MeWe CEO Mark Weinstein explains how his platform plans to be more private
Weinstein discusses how his platform intends to be different from Facebook and other major social media platforms

Facebook can’t seem to get through an entire year without finding itself embroiled in a new scandal, and it’s becoming more evident that some of its users are growing tired of its unending list of problems, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s inability to deal with them. 

The social networking giant’s troubles have left the door wide open for other companies to promote what it has to offer and try to attract these same users onto its respective platforms. 

One such company is MeWe, the self-branded “Anti-Facebook” social networking site that’s built on what they say is a core value of protecting users’ privacy. 

“When I saw Mark Zuckerberg say that privacy was a social norm of the past, I was like, ‘That’s the craziest statement I ever heard,’” MeWe CEO and privacy advocate Mark Weinstein told Rappler in an interview, referring to a quote by Zuckerberg in 2010. 

“We’re all human beings, and I know we all value the freedom to speak privately,” he added.

MeWe, as a name, is de rigeur for tech companies. It also, curiously, has the same initials as its CEO’s name.

What is MeWe?

MeWe, which launched in 2016, touts itself as a privacy-focused Facebook alternative for those who are tired of being “spied on, tracked, and sold down the river” by mainstream social media sites.

It functions almost exactly like Facebook: you can post text and photos, react to or share posts that appear on your newsfeed, chat with friends, join groups, browse pages, and create events. 

The difference is, on MeWe, the site says you’re protected by what it claims is the industry’s first “Privacy Bill of Rights.” It states that you, and not the platform, own all content and personal information you post. MeWe promises to never access your data, nor sell it to any third-party firm. 

The site also doesn’t run any ads whatsoever – targeted or otherwise. 

“Your content on MeWe – your page, group, contacts, and private friends’ news feeds, everything – is just in timeline order with who you’ve decided to connect to,” said Weinstein.

MeWe advisor Tim Berners-Lee (left) and CEO Mark Weinstein (right). Photo from Mark Weinstein/Twitter

In contrast, the business models of the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Google are heavily reliant on collecting user data and selling them to third-party firms for ad-targeting purposes. 

Facebook, for instance, gives you a “Boost Post” option, where you can pay to create an ad campaign and let the site’s complex algorithm promote it to users who are likely to engage with it. 

That option is not available on MeWe. Every time you post something on the site, you only reach your friends or your followers. You can’t pay the site to boost a post to users you haven’t connected with. 

You can filter what you want to see on your newsfeed, but MeWe itself cannot interfere or block content from being seen. 

Censorship

Weinstein believes that the microtargeting business model of Facebook and other mainstream social networking platforms is the fundamental problem of the spread of misinformation and fake news. (READ: Microtargeting looms larger than ever in pandemic era)

“On MeWe, you can’t plug into a system and pay us to boost your opinion to strangers that you don’t know. So there’s no way for your opinion to go viral then out onto the world,” he said. 

MeWe doesn’t allow Google crawlers on its site, meaning your profile and posts can’t be searched on search engines as well. 

He adds that by censoring or adding labels to posts, these platforms are only ignoring the problem itself and enforcing the political beliefs of its executives unto its users. 

“All the other platforms right now are doing political censorship, and that doesn’t make any sense. What they’re doing is they’re taking the political opinions of their CEOs, and they’re putting that into the culture of their site. And that’s not the right way to do it, in my opinion.”

The so-called “right way” for Weinstein is to welcome everyone on the platform and give them the freedom to seek out the information they want to believe in or subscribe to. And because there’s no algorithm involved, information, be it factual or false, won’t just appear in your newsfeed, unless you go searching for them. 

This seemingly hands-off approach to policing the people who can join the site and the kind of content they can post has attracted groups that many consider to have “extreme views,” as reported by the Rolling Stone. These include anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers, white supremacists, and other conspiracy theorists. 

When asked about the report’s claims, Weinstein reiterated his stance on censorship saying, “You believe what you want to believe. As long as you’re not inciting hate or violence, it’s none of our business, and your content can’t be boosted.” 

“We want good people, but we’re not going to censor you for having an opinion.”

Like other social media platforms, MeWe also has a content moderation team that checks on what’s being posted on the site to make sure it doesn’t contain any sensitive or offensive material. However, if you spot something that they might have missed, you can bring it to their attention by clicking the “Report Post” button that’s included in all posts. 

Weinstein says that they’re very proactive with content moderation and are partnering with organizations like the Internet Watch Foundation to learn about bad actors and how to spot them. 

But also like the major platforms, MeWe has had some controversy. Along with the aforementioned report from Rolling Stone, another report, from the UK’s The Times in January 2019, noted that it was being used by “neo-Nazis and perverts.” 

MeWe has refuted the claims of the said stories. The company says it took legal action against Rolling Stone for the article. The CEO also responded to it with a piece on Medium.

“MeWe has a strict terms of service designed to keep out haters, lawbreakers, bullies, violence inciters, etc. MeWe is home to upstanding, diverse members, and has ‘open group’ communities of all kinds, including those for sports, technology, entertainment, video games, fitness, health, travel, foodies, politics left and right, and more,” said Weinstein.

MeWe also said that the users and kinds of behavior that The Times article describes are clearly prohibited by its terms of service, and would be removed by their Trust and Safety Team once reported. It emphasized that illegal activity of any kind is prohibited on MeWe.

While the CEO’s stance on privacy sounds refreshing amid all the data collection that major platforms do, MeWe will likely go through similar challenges regarding the content, and what is allowed on a site. How will Weinstein’s moves measure up to Zuckerberg’s if MeWe does scale up? 

MeWe, oddly, appears to have a Facebook page itself, which is, perhaps, a testament to Facebook’s scale. The fledgling site needs all the exposure it can get. 

Revenue model

Instead of selling the data of its users or targeting them with ads, MeWe has a “freemium” revenue model. 

What this means is that you can use the site and the app without ever paying a single cent, but some of its features such as digital sticker packs, unlimited voice and video calls, extra cloud storage, and dark mode are locked behind a paywall. 

You can opt to get each feature individually or get all of them through a premium subscription that costs $4.99 per month. 

“Our users are not data to sell or target. It’s a really good business model when your users are your customers. At Facebook, the users are not the customers; the advertisers, the marketers, and the politicians are,” said Weinstein. 

You also have to pay a $1.99 monthly fee to create and manage a page for a business that your fans or customers can follow. 

Weinstein said that MeWe is expected to be profitable sometime next year thanks in large part to its “value proposition.” He explained that unlike Facebook and other platforms, MeWe doesn’t operate under the guise of being “free,” and its users appreciate that, which gets them to sign-up for premium or buy extra features. 

“Facebook is not free at all when they know everything about us. There’s nothing free about the experience. It’s actually dangerous. It’s wrong. And there’s no freedom,” he commented. 

“All we’re doing is what capitalism has always done – we’re taking care of our customers and they take care of us.”

Growth

MeWe, according to the company, is heading towards 40 million users by the end of the year, and Weinstein said they’re growing rapidly in different regions across the world, including the Philippines.

“Our traffic is about 34% in Asia, about 29% in Europe, about 3% down under in Australia and New Zealand, and the rest is in North America,” added Weinstein. “We’re translated in 19 languages already.”

In comparison, Facebook has over 2.6 billion users, with about 1.7 billion of them visiting the site on a daily basis. MeWe is far from hitting those numbers and becoming a household name in the industry, but Weinstein remains optimistic that people are “movers”. 

“People do move. People move from Facebook to Instagram, from Facebook to Snapchat, and they move for privacy,” he said. 

He added that there’s currently word-of-mouth about MeWe in the Philippines, and that he’s planning to put a marketing team in the country later this year to keep things going. 

Weinstein also mentioned that he’s working with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, who’s also a member of MeWe’s advisory board, on a decentralized storage project that will make it easier for you to transfer your data off of the site. 

He didn’t go into details, but said that the goal of the project is to make it easier for you to take control of your data, and walk away with it in case you decide to delete your account.

“We’ve got to have our freedom and our privacy back while having a great social experience because we’re social, and we now live in all parts of the world,” he said. 

“Democracy only functions with true privacy and true freedom of speech.” – Rappler.com

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