MeWe was mentioned in the FTC case against Facebook. I'd never heard of it, so I tried it.

• In the antitrust case against Meta, MeWe came up on a list of competitors to Facebook.
• I had literally never heard of MeWe. So I signed up.
• It's pretty empty, but it has a history of being for conspiracy theorists.

The Federal Trade Commission apparently thinks MeWe is a big competitor to Facebook. That's what it said this week when it gave a short list of social media rivals — most of which are long gone — at the beginning of a case that's trying to prove Mark Zuckerberg's company is a monopoly.

MeWe, you say? I've never heard of it!

Part of the FTC's complaint says that between 2012 and 2020, Facebook was hugely dominant in the space of "personal social networking" (the kind of social network where you talk to friends and family, as opposed to YouTube or X). And while there were other now-extinct competitors like MySpace or Google+, the only other existing ones are Snapchat and MeWe.

I've covered tech for a long time, but when I saw that, I said to myself: What is MeWe? So I dug into it a little — and even downloaded the app.

It turns out, MeWe was founded in 2016 by Mark Weinstein, who bills himself as a privacy advocate. It says it has more than 20 million users and "contains no ads, no targeting, and no newsfeed manipulation." The company raised $6 million in funding last year, with total funding of around $20 million, according to Crunchbase. It has a freemium user subscription model, similar to X.

As for MeWe this week, it seemed to find the connection to Facebook slightly offensive. "Unlike Facebook, we do not harvest our customers' data or operate any form of surveillance capitalism," Jeffrey S. Edell, MeWe's CEO, said in a statement to Business Insider. "Social media was meant to connect people, not harvest them. At MeWe, our members are valued as people, not turned into data points for sale."

I joined MeWe to see what it's like

I'm someone who loves to join any new flash-in-the-pan social app and spam my friends (looking back over my text exchanges with some friends, it's a long pathetic list of auto-generated invites to fallen soldiers like Houseparty, Squad, Cocoon, Gas). Yet, as I said, MeWe was not on my radar.

So I signed up. Here's what I found:

First of all, the signup page was unlike any other app I've joined. Instead of offering a simple "Create a new account," it offered a way to "Continue with Frequency" in a way that looked like when you can log into services with your Google account. I chose that and created an account.

As part of the signup flow, I had to pick topics I was interested in — generic things like "News," "Music," "Animals & Pets."

Once I signed up, I looked around. Now, I consider myself pretty adept at being able to navigate around a social app. Not to brag, but I was Friendster user No. 227. (I know, you're impressed).

But I found MeWe incredibly confusing and inscrutable. I looked for a way to sync contacts or invite friends, but couldn't. (I think this is due to its strict privacy, which frankly, great!) But it meant there basically wasn't anything on my main feed (a classic onboarding problem).

Poking around, MeWe has a section of groups and communities you can join based on interests — things like a group for metal detecting, homesteading, etc. When I looked around some of these, they seemed often dead (no posts since 2024), slightly spammy, or written in Chinese.

There's a reason for that last part: MeWe found some popularity during the Hong Kong protests of 2019 and 2020 due to its pro-privacy and anti-censorship stance as a Facebook alternative.

In the US, MeWe had a similar miniboom among a certain group of users who were disenchanted with Facebook in the early days of 2021.

Facebook had banned a quickly-growing group called "Stop the Steal" dedicated to discussing how Donald Trump had really won the 2020 election. After January 6, other groups and users on the topic were banned, and people fled to a variety of smaller apps — mainly better-known conservative-friendly apps like Parler, Gab, or Rumble, but also to MeWe.

When Business Insider reported on MeWe a few days after January 6, 2021, it had gained 200,000 new users in the days since Parler had been taken offline by Cloudflare. We wrote:

One glance into the app's many conservative groups reveals plenty of vitriol and misinformation similar to Parler's. "We all know the capital storming had Antifa and bad actors," one MeWe user wrote, repeating the misinformation that it wasn't Trump supporters that rioted but people who oppose fascism.

Look, I don't think anyone credibly thinks MeWe is a serious contender to competing with Facebook. As for how this plays in the FTC's antitrust case, well, I'm not sure.

I think Meta has a claim that other apps like TikTok and YouTube are competitors to Reels, but which apps are or aren't competitors isn't the only aspect of the antitrust case.