Former President Donald Trump’s team has created and launched a new social media platform called GETTR. Trump’s former spokesman Jason Miller spearheaded development of the platform, branding it as another option, different from Big Tech platforms — most of which Trump is banned from.
GETTR like… Twitter
GETTR is in its beta form and will completely launch on the Fourth of July, the national holiday celebrating America’s independence from the British. The site’s mission statement claims the platform is “fighting cancel culture, promoting common sense, defending free speech, challenging social media monopolies, and creating a true marketplace of ideas.”
Miller is taking the initiative with the app’s image and message, but has not yet confirmed whether former President Trump himself will be using the platform as a way to voice his views now that he has been banned from two of the largest social media platforms in the world — Facebook and Twitter.
“The former president is going to make his own decision, it’s certainly there and ready for him should he make the decision — we would welcome that. There is an account reserved for him and waiting for him but that’s a decision for him to make,” said someone close to the project to CNN.
Trump was banned from Facebook in early January of 2021 after posting what the social media site considered inflammatory and dangerous comments about the January 6th Capitol Riots, when his most extreme followers attempted to storm the Capitol Building.
As Facebook owns the image-based social media platform Instagram, the same ban applies to the former President on that service as well.
Trump was then suspended from Twitter, his preferred mode of communicating with his supporters, but the ban from that platform was permanent.
Trump, who never conceded to President Joe Biden, repeatedly and falsely claimed on social media after the Nov. 3 election that the race had been stolen from him by widespread fraud.
Trump’s rocky history with social media
The move to suspend Trump from social media stunned the country, with some arguing that it amounted to silencing the then-US President, and others contending that the ban should have happened long before, as Trump was known to post misleading information on the platform.
The ban on Trump’s account was upheld by Facebook’s Oversight Board, which is made up of human rights activists, law and global affairs experts, journalists, and former world leaders, in early May.
In the Board’s most recent decision, Trump’s ban from Facebook will last until 2023, when the panel of experts will decide “whether the risk to public safety has receded,” at which point his account will be reinstated, Facebook stated Friday.
If he is permitted to join Facebook again in two years, he will be subject to “rapidly escalating sanctions” if found to violate the platform’s rules. These sanctions could involve a permanent ban on his account.
Trump then turned to his own personal blog to relay communication to his base of followers, but the blog was permanently shut down less than a month after it went live.
The blog, titled “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump,” was scrubbed from Trump’s website. The blog, originally billed as a new “communications platform,” seemed ill-equipped to take on the largest social media companies.
It “will not be returning,” Miller told CNBC.
Whether GETTR is the evolution of Trump’s blog or the answer to the void he has left on social media is yet to be determined. Trump’s social media posts received a huge amount of engagement before he was banned. The median amount of interaction received by a post from him was 272,000 likes and shares.
After Trump was barred from making statements on his preferred outlet of Twitter, he made them on his personal website, where they would often be shared by his supporters to as much or more engagement than his own posts. One criticism he leveled against Biden’s border policy — “Our Country is being destroyed!”– had 661,000 shares.
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