- Site Name: MeWe
- Date Created: May 2012 (formerly known as Sgrouples)
- Main Purpose: To compete against traditional social media and allow space for free-speech groups and individuals.
- Number of Users: 16 million members [1]
- Typical Users: Extremists and anti-semitic individuals, in addition to believers of conspiracy theories.
Founded in January of 2012, MeWe was created as a free speech alternative to Facebook and Twitter, first as Sgrouples and later on as MeWe.
Like other social media networking sites, MeWe users post text, images and emojis to a feed. They also set their posts to disappear after a limited amount of time. According to Mashable [2], MeWe is now one of many go-to social media sites for conservatives as it allows the publication of misinformation that other mainstream platforms like Facebook and Twitter ban. The site does, however, claim to prohibit content that is obscene, pornographic, or impersonating someone else in its Terms of Service.
MeWe saw a lot of momentum in November 2020 around the election. Users joined quickly, believing that free speech was of prime importance to them. Since then, it has gained popularity among users with non-mainstream views. This includes right-wing conservatives, conspiracy theorists, and anti-vaxxers.
Although the site claims to prohibit hateful and violent rhetoric, we see a lot of inflammatory content on MeWe. A common type of content we see on MeWe is from MAGA (Make America Great Again) groups and other right-wing organizations like the one below. We also see violent threats against the executive leadership of high-profile organizations. This is in addition to racist, anti-semitic and anti-Islamic hate speech.
Here is an example of the type of content shared from a MAGA member:
Here is another example of a post with violent rhetoric against Mark Zukerberg, the CEO of Facebook:
Here is another example of anti-Islamist content found on the social networking site.
Here are a few additional examples of hate speech we have detected in our Cyber API:
Our discovery process on social media platforms allows us to constantly identify and crawl new content we mark as illicit. Our methodology includes automatically identifying certain hashtags, groups, profiles and pages to monitor illicit content and other types of extremist content with our API.
MeWe is just one of many free-speech social networks – like Gab, Bitchute, Telegram and others- that Webz.io covers on the deep web. We combine coverage of these alternative social networks along with forums, marketplaces, networks, and chat applications to deliver the widest and most comprehensive coverage in the industry.
Want to learn more about the sources we cover in the deep and dark web? Contact one of our dark web data experts to learn more today!
