In the wake of his banishment from Twitter and Facebook, Donald Trump’s allies have been searching for a cancel-culture-free social media site to become a go-to network for conservatives. Creating such a network from scratch costs megabucks, and is rife with problems, as founders and funders of Parler, the ill-fated right-wing app, found out. However, as the late comedian Jimmy Durante often said: “Everybody wants to get into the act.”
Enter former Donald Trump advisor Jason Miller, and the pro-Trump, Chinese real estate developer, and media mogul, Guo Wengui. Mix Trump’s Big Lie, with disinformation about the coronavirus and vaccines, and you’ve got Gettr, an attempt to become a right-wing clone of Twitter.
In early July, Jason Miller announced the launching of Gettr, a pro-MAGA free-speech social media platform. Gettr’s website messages: “Don’t be Cancelled. Flex Your 1st Amendment. Celebrate Freedom.” And early users flexed their 1st Amendment by “multiple hashtags with racist and anti-Semitic slurs [that] hit the app’s trending section, according to Recode, and multiple reports found a torrent of porn,” The Verge’s Casey Newton reported.
According to Politico’s Tina Nguyen, Gettr is designed to be a pro-Trump, anti-China “social media outpost where MAGA types could post freely and, through the mere act of signing up, stick it to Big Tech. It was billed as the logical extension of the former president’s months long battle with the major social media companies, two of which had booted him in the aftermath of the Capitol riots on Jan. 6. And though Trump himself had not committed to being on it, it seemed like the type of place where he inevitably would end up after having launched a failed professional blog of his own” (https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/01/maga-app-bannon-chinese-billionaire-497767).
Gettr is not new to social media, having “existed for nearly a year as a Chinese-language social media network linked to Guo and G-TV Media, and on which anti-CCP content had been promoted on a regular basis,” Nguyen reported.
In mid-May, The Washington Post’s Jeanne Whalen, Craig Timberg and Eva Dou reported (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/17/guo-wengui-disinformation-steve-bannon/): “A sprawling online network tied to Chinese businessman Guo Wengui has become a potent platform for disinformation in the United States, attacking the safety of coronavirus vaccines, promoting false election-fraud claims and spreading baseless QAnon conspiracies, according to research published Monday by the network analysis company Graphika.”
The Post pointed out that “Graphika said the network includes media websites such as GTV, for which Guo last year publicly said he was raising funds, along with thousands of social media accounts that Graphika said amplify content in a coordinated fashion. The network also includes more than a dozen local-action groups over which Guo has publicly claimed an oversight role, Graphika found.”
In a Daily Beast story titled “Trumpworld App Is Bankrolled by Fugitive Chinese Billionaire” (https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumpworld-app-is-bankrolled-by-fugitive-chinese-billionaire?ref=scroll) Will Sommer, Adam Rawnsley and Asawin Suebsaeng reported that Miller’s new enterprise “is backed by a fugitive Chinese billionaire who once invited Steve Bannon to live on his yacht.” In 2020, when Bannon was arrested over fraud charges related to a separate crowd-funding project to help build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border -- since pardoned by Trump – he was arrested aboard Guo’s yacht. Politico noted that “in 2019, it was reported that Guo was a member of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club.”
The Daily Beast noted that “the site received initial funding from a foundation owned by Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui and his family.” Miller told The Daily that Guo’s “family foundation” provided Gettr with early funding.” (Gui also goes by the name Miles Kwok.)
The Daily Beast reported that Guo “courted President Trump’s then-personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani. In the run-up to the 2020 election, pro-Guo pundits teased the existence of a Biden laptop ‘bombshell’ weeks before news that Giuliani had obtained Hunter Biden’s device. After social media networks suspended or limited the reach of materials taken from Hunter Biden’s laptop, Guo’s social media platforms became one of the few places hosting materials from the laptop, including revenge porn of Hunter Biden, while Guo posed for pictures with Giuliani smoking cigars.”
Miller denied that Guo directly invested in GETTR, doesn’t have a seat on its board, or that he is instrumental in any of its daily operations.
The Daily Beast reported that “Guo, a vocal critic of the Chinese government who is wanted in that country on corruption charges, has developed close ties to top Trump allies. The billionaire paid former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon at least $1 million dollars, and teamed up with him to promote a Chinese doctor’s claims that the coronavirus was created by the Chinese government. When federal authorities arrested Bannon on fraud charges in August 2020, they found him on a yacht owned by Guo.”
According to Miller, Bannon is not formally connected to GETTR.
Miller said that Gettr users “do not have a right to…bully, harass, or stalk others,” or to “traffic in homophobic or racial or religious slurs, or promote hate speech, or encourage self-harm or illegal behavior, or dox people, or post sexually explicit content.”
Bloomberg reporter Jennifer Jacobs recently tweeted: “Trump isn’t joining Jason Miller’s new social media platform, Gettr – won’t have any financial stake or participation, I’m told. Apparently the ex president still has plans for a separate platform. Unclear what exactly.”
According to TechCrunch’s Taylor Hatmaker, “Just days after a Twitter clone from former Trump spokesperson Jason Miller launched, the new social network is already beset by problems. For one, hackers quickly leveraged Gettr’s API to scrape the email addressesof more than 85,000 of its users. Usernames, names and birthdays were also part of the scraped data set, which was surfaced by Alon Gal, co-founder of cybersecurity firm Hudson Rock (https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/06/gettr-trump-social-network-hack-defaced/).
“When threat actors are able to extract sensitive information due to neglectful API implementations, the consequence is equivalent to a data breach and should be handled accordingly by the firm [and] examined by regulators,” Gal told TechCrunch.
TechCrunch’s Hatmaker noted: “The online pro-Trump ecosystem remains scattered in mid-2021. With Trump banned and the roiling conspiracy network around QAnon no longer welcome on Facebook and Twitter, Gettr positioned itself as a refuge for mainstream social media’s many outcasts. But given Gettr’s mounting early woes, the sketchy Twitter clone’s moment in the sun might already be coming to an end.”