The social network that Sir Tim Berners-Lee hoped would be free from abuse has been found to contain gun sales, drugs and antisemitism.

When Sir Tim, inventor of the world wide web, joined the advisory board of MeWe, a social media app with ambitions to compete with Facebook and Instagram, he said that too much of the internet was open to abuse. MeWe, he claimed in 2016, would give “the power of the internet back to the people”.

Sir Tim, 63, also recently proposed a new “contract for the web”, requiring digital companies to “develop technologies that will support the best in humanity and challenge the worst”.

However, the MeWe app, which was launched in 2015 and has two million users worldwide, is vulnerable to