The Social Media Migration Wave: From Facebook and Twitter to MeWe and Telegram

First Facebook and Twitter joined forces to shut down the account of U.S. President Donald Trump, then the Parler platform was removed from the Apple and Google stores, and even Amazon came down hard and outright banned the entire platform—which makes one want to compare it with the domestic ruling party’s move to shut down the CTi News channel.

In fact, beyond the Facebook camp (Instagram, WhatsApp) and Twitter, many alternative apps and platforms have risen amid the recent wave of support for Trump. For example, the four social platforms and messaging apps introduced below include “MeWe”, “SafeChat”, “Telegram”, and “Signal”.

Basically, these all place special emphasis on protecting information security and on freedom of speech free from the control of giants. As for whether they actively resist regulation through technology, or whether the threat simply isn’t big enough for anyone to care yet, it’s hard to say.

MeWe

MeWe, which is relatively unfamiliar to people here, is already a veteran social platform abroad. According to Apptopia data, MeWe has accumulated 16 million downloads worldwide since 2012. But after Parler was forcibly removed, MeWe’s global downloads reached nearly 200,000, with 70% of the new downloads coming from the United States, and it recently jumped to first place on the trending charts. According to a January 12 report by the U.S. outlet TechCrunch, in just the two days of January 9 and 10 there were 110,000 download records, and in the past 72 hours one million new users registered, with more than 20,000 new users added per hour at present.

MeWe’s tagline is “building the next-generation social platform”, but it’s essentially used in a way similar to Facebook. Its interface design is friendlier than SafeChat’s, though unfortunately it only supports Simplified Chinese, and the web version’s design style still looks like it’s from several years ago. Still, if you can find a group of like-minded companions to join together, it has a chance to become a little world of its own.

Interestingly, MeWe is currently one of the few social platforms that from the start wants you to pay $4.99 a month to become a premium member, offering value-added services such as unlimited calls, unlimited backgrounds and stickers, 100GB of cloud storage, and a prominent identity. Also, creating interest groups is free, while creating your own fan page requires paying at least $1.99.

SafeChat

As an alternative to social platforms, as far as I know quite a few high-tech talents have chosen to join the SafeChat camp. It has a Facebook-like timeline layout and went online on September 11, 2013. Perhaps because the developer, Maxim Glazov, is Singaporean, the platform is fairly well localized into Chinese, though there are still quite a few bugs in the interface design that affect smooth operation—we’ll see whether it improves in the future.

At first, using SafeChat feels like going back to a social platform from ten years ago, except it lacks Facebook’s perverse pleasure of adding friends at random with ulterior motives (after all, it can’t sell your privacy the way Facebook does). Combined with its low degree of customization and a business model with no visible highlights, I personally am not very optimistic about whether it can become a long-term mainstream online platform.

SafeChat also has worrying aspects. For example, the first page I saw after registering recommended, as its first article, a post from Sound of Hope (a sibling media outlet of NTD and The Epoch Times), and the first channel I saw with a blue verification badge was NTD Asia Pacific Television—which inevitably makes one worry whether this platform will become a gathering place for internet rumors.

Telegram

Telegram, which had a spell of popularity in the middle of last year and then went quiet for a while, now maintains a fuzzy state where everyone has registered, friend circles don’t really use it, and channel subscription rates are decent (the domestic usage ecosystem feels like it will become like Plurk). According to the latest official announcement, in the past 72 hours it gained 25 million new registrations worldwide—more than a million more than the total population of the island of Taiwan.

Simply put, compared with Facebook, Telegram leans more toward the messaging-app usage model of Line, but besides Groups it also has a Channel feature similar to a fan page. I quite recommend it for internal team use, but it’s not very suitable for daily life—after all, the elders at home probably won’t accept its layout model, especially since it has no Chinese interface, and it lacks the currently popular sticker fun and many applications. At best it becomes a companion app to the Line messaging app.

Signal

Because WhatsApp fell into Facebook’s hands, Tesla CEO Elon Musk called on his followers to switch to Signal, sending Signal’s user numbers soaring. Funnily enough, Signal is actually another app developed by a WhatsApp co-founder after leaving, effectively pitting the family against itself.

Signal is a pure messaging app, mainly emphasizing enhanced one-on-one confidential communication mechanisms, with no ads and no possibility of tracking. A smartphone is a required installation platform; even if you want to use it on a tablet or desktop, it will require you to install the app on your phone first—which is a rather troublesome point.

But while actually trying out Signal, I suddenly felt three black lines appear above my head. That’s because Signal is so simple that it’s basically like the traditional SMS sending and receiving function of a phone—at most it’s a secure messaging SMS that you’re not afraid of Chunghwa Telecom recording the content of.

Voice calls? That’s just making a phone call directly. Sending images? Phones could already do that back in the 3G era…