Why we created Arwen

We’d been watching and listening in dismay to the growing wave of abuse, toxicity and harm sweeping across social media platforms in recent years. To say that the status quo was becoming unsustainable was an understatement. In fact, social media was rapidly becoming antisocial. Too many people have been left feeling their only option was to leave the conversation. We don’t think that's right. So we created Arwen. 

We were proud to launch Arwen across the Summer of 2021 in the shadow of the racist abuse storm that erupted after the final of the Euro’s football tournament. We have now moved full steam ahead into helping as many people as we possibly can and are proud that Arwen helps to shelter 40,910,100 people from receiving or viewing online abuse and toxic content. This number is rising as more people find out that there is a solution to this problem and it's easy to fix. 

It’s always been important to ensure safety online, but it’s never been more so than now, with an increase of 20% in online abuse that has happened during the pandemic. 

This unwanted content makes free-speech more constrained with fewer people willing to engage in online debate, it creates toxic environments that create anxiety for adults and children alike and it reflects a bullying culture that has taken hold on certain corners of what should be a technological new age of enlightenment. 

Arwen is proud to be helping to make social media social again so everyone can feel safe to engage in healthy discourse in the way they want to. Brands are finding that by providing healthy communities more people are interested in talking about them and sharing their experiences, whether that’s what they’ve bought or the experiences they want to share.    

And so what does Arwen do? Well, but quite simply, Arwen is a universal platform that helps individual users to manage their social media conversations by identifying and eliminating hate speech – from text, imagery, emojis and !*@? automatically in under a second. What’s more, each user can easily customise their preferences to reflect their own tolerance to different types of hate speech.  

We've grown fast, but we've still got so much we want to do. Here's to making social media social again.

Matt and David