AT1 — Data Science Innovation in MeWe.

Author: Antonio Wang

Student ID: 12972042

The MeWe

MeWe is a free social media software that is largely similar to MeWe. In 2020, Mashable described it as replicating MeWe’s features. Users can post texts and images, as well as chat with their friends and family from across the globe. However, due to this, MeWe does not have any advantages over existing social media sites and will have a hard time attracting users. In 2020, following an influx of users in Hong Kong, MeWe has reached roughly 8 million users.

Challenges MeWe faces

Driver or challenge 1: Making sure MeWe can make money.

Despite having millions of users worldwide, MeWe is mainly used for its ability to contact friends and family from across the world no matter where the user is. And, to share and show off interesting things that the user has found. It is important for MeWe to address this issue as if it is left unresolved, MeWe will be unable to make money/lacking in funds or create value for itself.

Driver or challenge 2: Keeping the sites clean and clear of prohibited and banned content.

Due to having millions of users daily, it is difficult to ensure that users are using the platforms in the correct manner. Some users may post content that is prohibited, may include hate, violent and extreme content, or even fraudulent information. At the same time, due to MeWe’s light approach towards content moderation, it has been made popular amongst conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers. This issue needs to be resolved so that users are not subjected to unpleasant and disagreeable content. This can prevent users having their values distorted, being a victim of fraud and scam as well as users leaving to a different cleaner platform.

Driver or challenge 3: Having a unique way of making money.

Although MeWe can continue to follow in Facebook’s footsteps, if it doesn’t have its own unique way of creating value for itself, it will never overtake the other social media sites. Not only will MeWe not be able to overtake them, but it is also possible that users and investors may switch to a different social media platform as well.

Opportunities for Innovations from Data Science

Opportunity 1: Targeted consumer advertisements.

The way that MeWe can resolve this issue is to sell advertisement spots to other businesses on its social media platform. However, just selling advertisement spaces is not enough. Businesses may be enticed by the large number of users that this platform has, but they need to be ensured that users will see their advertisements, as there are many businesses competing for these spaces. If MeWe is unable to assure the businesses that their ads will be seen, then the businesses may find a different approach to market themselves.

The way that MeWe can resolve this challenge is to target consumers with specific advertisements. “Personalization is a key component to improve the campaign results. Personalization is a very important factor for Generation Z who grew up on digital and social media and now expect a high level of targeting and personalization. What’s interesting is that 40% of them admit that they would stop visiting a site if it couldn’t anticipate what they needed, liked, or wanted.” (Shkuropat). To do this, MeWe can use Big Data in dynamic creative advertising. Dynamic creative advertising is to show different ads to different people based on different parameters such as gender, profession, age, location, language, as well as what the users search for. Both MeWe and marketers analyse these parameters to show the user advertisements that are targeted towards them, which can greatly raise their interest. This way businesses can be assured that their advertisements will be seen and has a high chance of being remembered or clicked upon.

This strategy has already been proven successful by the social media giant Meta (previously known as Facebook). According to Johnston (2022), as much as 97% of Meta’s total revenue ($32.8 billion) came from advertisements. This shows how successful this targeted consumer advertisements innovation was and how it can resolve a major challenge that MeWe faces.

Opportunity 2: Automated removal of prohibited posts and fake users.

The first way to counteract these issues is to filter posts that may include the prohibited content. MeWe can approach this is by initially having people manually go through posts and identify any harmful ones. Through machine learning, these posts are used as training data so that the bot will be able to identify future harmful posts by itself. These posts will be automatically flagged by the bot, and it will be removed and no longer visible to the user. The more posts that are removed, the more the bot will learn and become better at detecting harmful posts. Any posts that are reported by users will also be checked and become training data.

This innovation is also being used by Meta. And according to Sara Khodeir, “Facebook uses machine learning (ML) to classify accounts as authentic or fake.” She introduces deep entity classification (DEC), which is a ML framework designed to detect abusive accounts. “She demonstrates that while accounts in isolation may be difficult to classify, their embeddings in the social graph are difficult for attackers to replicate or evade at scale. Sara shares how Facebook has solved the problem of limited labels by employing a multistage, multitask-learning paradigm that leverages many medium-precision, automated labels and a small number of high-precision, human-labelled samples. The DEC system is responsible for the removal of hundreds of millions of fake accounts.” (Khodeir 2019)

This strategy has also been proven successful by Meta as the posts that are shown on its platforms are clean of harmful content. This means that MeWe can follow suit and keep its platform clean and safe for the community.

Opportunity 3: Make sure to use virtual reality and augmented reality.

With the rising popularity of virtual reality and augmented reality, MeWe can start setting its eyes on this business opportunity. MeWe can do this by creating its own virtual reality or augmented reality app which users can use to communicate with their friends or play games on it. Something like the Metaverse. However, MeWe should go above and beyond just copying Facebook further. To do this they could introduce advertisements to virtual reality and augmented reality. The software will detect data from the user’s location, surroundings and what they see. Then it could suggest items and products while the user is experiencing the software. Then it can overlay the suggested item into the real world (augmented reality) and if the user hovers over the suggested item, the augmented reality will display a link that allows the user to purchase the suggested item. An example of this would be, the user opens his fridge, and the software will display some augmented reality coke bottles that entice the user to purchase them.

This innovation has not been proved or adopted by any company in the past, so there is no previous research that can show its effectiveness. However, due to this, it will become a brand new innovation and will definitely garner the attention of both users and investors. This will give MeWe a large advantage and uniqueness over other social media platforms and also attract new users.

Implementation Considerations

Implementation 1 consideration: Losing its selling point.

Although the implementation of this innovation will net them a lot more profit, it is removing one of its largest selling points. MeWe markets itself as being data secure and will not sell user data to other businesses for whatever reason. This innovation will greatly impact MeWe as they will lose users that were attracted by their data secure nature. But since their features are much like Facebook, in turn they will gain more users and investors in the long run.

Implementation 2 consideration: Losing certain users.

Due to its light approach towards content moderation, a certain chunk of MeWe’s users do post controversial and harmful content. Implementing this innovation will definitely dissuade these users from using this platform. However, keeping the platform clean and safe will attract more users in the long run.

Implementation 3 consideration: Never done before.

Because this innovation has never been adopted before, there is no previous basis for MeWe’s innovation team to use. They will need to create a brand new software which will take a long time to come into the light. The success of this innovation is also not guaranteed so a lot of market research and time will be needed to go into this development.