QAnon followers are angry that Team Trump’s new social media platform is allowing users to mock them and post porn “and bad words and stuff.”
GETTR is the Twitter clone—that is literally stealing content from Twitter—launched by Jason Miller, a former senior adviser to former President Donald Trump. The app will be officially launched on Sunday, but is already available in beta form on Apple and Google’s app stores.
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The app, which is full of privacy and security bugs, is positioning itself as the latest social network to be the last bastion of free speech on the internet. GETTR’s own tagline makes it clear that this is not a platform for snowflakes.
“Fighting cancel culture, promoting common sense, defending free speech, challenging social media monopolies, and creating a true marketplace of ideas.”
But that defense of free speech doesn’t extend to pornography or “bad words.”
According to the app’s own terms of service, the company reserves the right to “address content that comes to our attention that we believe is … pornographic” as well as material it views as “offensive, obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy… violent, harassing, threatening, abusive, illegal, or otherwise objectionable or inappropriate.”
Unfortunately, whatever protections the site has in place to filter out such content aren’t working right now, and as a result, one of GETTR’s biggest potential user bases has sworn off the platform after it was flooded with porn and “bad words.”
This is how “We The Media”, a major QAnon channel on Telegram run by major figures in the conspiracy movement, described GETTR on Thursday night:
“Seems like vapor. Slow to delete shill porn. Big names denying Trump wants anything to do with it. Alienating liberals by defining itself as a conservative echo chamber. Another fart in the wind.”
Jordan Sather, another major QAnon influencer, was also disgusted by the presence of “titties and bad words and stuff.”
A search for the QAnon hashtag on GETTR on Friday morning found the topic flooded with a mixture of anime porn, posts mocking the people who believe in QAnon conspiracy theories, and a flood of pictures of topless old men wearing nothing but underpants.
Another major problem for QAnon followers is fake accounts pretending to be major QAnon influencers on the platform.
Accounts claiming to be disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn and Kraken lawyer Sidney Powell have been created there, even though John Sabal, the organizer of a recent QAnon conference in Dallas that featured both Powell and Flynn, said he had confirmed neither had created official accounts on GETTR.
The platform also has official-looking accounts for public figures such as Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Trump himself, all of which are fake.
Lin Wood, the pro-Trump lawyer who has become arguably the biggest QAnon influencer, said Thursday that he had created a GETTR account but would not be posting on the platform for now. “Telegram remains the battlefield for the present time,” Wood told his 850,000 Telegram followers.
GETTR is bankrolled by fugitive Chinese billionaire and close friend of Steve Bannon, Guo Wengui. It is the latest in a series of right-wing focused social media platforms that are hoping to capture the attention of those who have been banned from mainstream platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
However, so far, none of these alternative platforms—including Gab, Parler, MeWe, and Mike Lindell’s Frank Speech—have succeeded, primarily because they quickly descend into echo-chambers of right-wing and conservative talking points, and with no libs to own, there’s just no fun.
Another problem for GETTR and its competitors is that former president Donald Trump is not present—at least not in an official capacity.
Miller has already said Trump won’t have any role or presence on the platform, and he is still reportedly planning to launch his own social media platform, though there are no details about what that will look like or when it will launch.
So for now, QAnon followers are likely to stick to Telegram, where they can continue to spread conspiracies about GETTR, such as this from a user called Maria: “I think this is another creation by the CIA.”
