“President Xi is welcome to join”: Jason Miller on Gettr’s free speech crusade

Conservative social media platforms get a bad press. A browse for news on the latest challenger to the mainstream giants reveals just how hopelessly, nakedly partisan America’s mainstream news network has become. Headlines include: “The latest pro-Trump Twitter clone leaks user data on day 1”; “Gettr, the latest pro-Trump social network, is already a mess”; “The rise and fall of Gettr”. It has barely been a week.

The CEO of Gettr (a contraction of “get together”) is unfazed. There are only two tests for entry into this community, according to Jason Miller, who speaks with me over Zoom from inside an SUV in New York. Number one: “You believe in free speech”. Number two: “You reject cancel culture”.

Miller is an old hand in the sphere of Republican strategy and comms, with a long track record working on political campaigns, including Rudi Giuliani’s presidential bid in 2008. He was snapped up by Donald Trump in 2016 after a spell as Ted Cruz’s top campaign adviser and became one of the ex-president’s most senior aides.

Miller admits that most of the energy for the project has come from Trump supporters. Trump’s banishment from Facebook and Twitter after the Capitol Hill riots on 6 January catalysed it. And Gettr’s launch on Independence Day last week, Miller tells me, was chosen to symbolise “freedom from Big Tech”.

But Miller says he wants Gettr to act as a platform for the silenced everywhere: “I never say that this is just for Republicans or just for conservatives, or even just for Americans, quite frankly, because the issue of free speech is one that’s global”.

Over 1.25 million people made an account with the app in the first five days, of which 44 per cent are registered in the United States, according to Miller. The second largest market is Brazil, which makes up a further 16 per cent. There Jair Bolsanaro, the populist right-wing president, is waging a turf war with the establishment and warning of a rigged election.

Gettr’s strapline is “The marketplace of ideas”. The interface is exactly like Twitter’s, but there will be no censoring of political content or “shadow-banning” here. Trump would not have been censored on Gettr – if he were on it. And Gettr promises never to collect personal data beyond a registration email and birth year.

Fulfilling the promise of the marketplace, though, will be a momentous challenge. The top trending stories each day tend to be on staple conservative themes such as Venezuelan socialism and Californian woke madness. So long as Gettr brands itself as a refuge for the right, it is hard to see big hitters on the left migrating over, along with their followers.

Miller acknowledges this difficulty. “We want to make sure that everybody has some kind of platform, and maybe here in the US, that will be conservatives feeling they’ve been de-platformed”, he says. “But maybe in Hong Kong – maybe it’s students who feel that the growing influence of the CCP is infringing on their freedoms.”

I ask if Miller sees mainland China as a serious growth opportunity. “I don’t think we’ll have too many members of the CCP signing up. But I mean, they’re welcome to join me, right? Free speech is free speech. You know, if President Xi wants to open an account, he’s more than welcome to.”

Critics warn – and many hope – that Gettr becomes a conspiracy theory and misinformation hothouse. Conversation turns to the site’s moderation policy.

“I’ll be very much on the level with you, this won’t be easy”, Miller admits. “We want to make sure that people will never be censored or de-platformed based on their political beliefs.”

Gettr is not the Wild West. Through a tiered system of AI and human moderators – with extreme cases sent to the top – bad behaviour can be detected and dealt with.

But anything short of illegal – such as violent speech or child pornography – will only be moderated reluctantly. Miller is reticent to draw a line.

The basic liberalism of the proposal – Miller’s faith in community trust – will raise eyebrows. It sounds like early Zuckerberg idealism born again.

Yet politicians have yet to come up with a better solution to the crisis enveloping the digital public sphere. One of the ironies of the debate is that while Republicans want the Big Tech platforms to do less policing, they want to be able to prosecute them as if they were state actors. Democrats want the platforms to do more policing – but are happy to let them maintain their immunity from prosecution as private fiefdoms.  

Miller knows the system isn’t perfect. People will say untrue things. “A few cases” have reached executive review. But “banning or suppressing certain things is also misinformation”, he argues, referring to the disputed New York Post article on Hunter Biden which Facebook and Twitter suppressed without justification late last year. Both platforms later reinstated the article and Twitter’s CEO issued a public apology.

Then there’s the Trump problem. The man who started all this is nowhere to be seen on Gettr. Miller assures me he has the handle @RealDonaldTrump reserved for him in a “big, beautiful safe in the corner” of his office. Other sources claim Trump has plans for a “separate platform”. Trump is directing a fresh lawsuit against Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet, owner of Google, over his online ban.

The platform that was launched by a former Trump aide to address the specific grievances of Trump supporters would surely be the former president’s new home if he had any confidence in it. “He’s taking his time with it and I know enough from having worked with him to not push them too hard on anything”, Miller says.

But a lot of people want Gettr to fail and Trump’s absence is an ill omen. And Miller’s confidence in “the marketplace of ideas” mantra, while politically appealing, elides the fact that social media is no ordinary product. Miller says he wants two million registrations on the site by the end of the month: an impressive feat from nothing, and enough to keep a small ecosystem going. But it is hardly the 330 million monthly Twitter users – or the 52 million daily Reddit users – that give these platforms their dynamism. If we know anything about the social media industry by now, it is that the network, not the consumer, is king.