A Revolution in Social Media, With User Ownership and Safer Algorithms
21st May 2024: The world’s first social media network to be majority owned by users has been launched in the UK.
ChatWise aims to take on Instagram, Twitter and other household names by offering users a piece of the company, and a safer social media.
Developed in the tech hub of Cambridge, ChatWise offers unique features that have consistently been requested by public personalities, parents and politicians and are not yet available on any social network. For example, all users join as ‘private’ and only with verification, can they post publicly.
“As a society, we are not ready for the AI and deep-fake with people posting anything hidden behind fake accounts. ChatWise is taking the world in a slightly different direction” said Josh Gulati, co-founder of ChatWise. “With advancements in technology, it takes less than 1 minute to verify a user, then why not do it to protect our democracy and society?”
Many analysts believe the ability to post anonymously is the main cause for much of the horrific abuse and disinformation so often seen online.
More than half of the company shares (60%) have been reserved for users in a world’s first such democratic financial structure. Following the launch, the first 1 Million users are guaranteed to be offered ‘growth shares’.
“Meta is worth $1.2 trillion – that equates to over $400 for each user, but all that wealth is kept by a few rich shareholders. Only two weeks ago Mr Trump’s Truth Social was listed on the New York Stock Exchange with just 500k users for an all-share valuation of c$8billion. Mr Trump owns 58% of all those shares: rich are getting richer at the cost of unwitting users who are being harvested for cash. ChatWise will reclaim some of that wealth and return it to people with its innovative financial structure.” said Josh who is a Qualified Chartered Accountant.
ChatWise is also designed from the ground up to focus on safety. For instance, there is a button that will immediately inform the company of offending users.
“Social networks should to be ‘cool’ but safety of our children can’t be compromised. No stone should be left unturned when it comes to saving a life” said Josh Gulati.
In 2019, Facebook’s senior staff member Arturo Béjar, who recently testified to the US congress, allegedly suggested a similar button that could safeguard teenagers but the company allegedly decided against it.
“ChatWise will be a people-owned company and will do what is best for our children. I will only be satisfied when I can comfortably see my own child using ChatWise, that’s the bar we have set” said Josh.
The ChatWise project started a few years ago with a fundamental review of how social media was working. Thousands from across the world, including the UK, India and Japan were consulted about features they would like to see in a social media app of the future, that the CEO feels is in later stages of development.
“We will continue to learn and improve our algorithms to do what our users-shareholders want. If we don’t deliver, public can simply sack me and change the team: as majority shareholder, public will have the ultimate power to take control and make us do what they want” said the founder and CEO.