Blatant Twitter Rip-off Gives Trump 700 Characters to Spew Hate

When Donald Trump was kicked off of Twitter and Facebook, it was predicted that he would return with a vengeance, likely with his own social media platform. Our collective nightmare has come true: according to Politico, we must now contend with GETTR, an app headed up by former Trump aide Jason Miller, who is one of the few people close to Trump who has not gone to jail. It currently has a 4.9 rating in the App Store—undoubtedly the result of Trump acolytes conspiring to give it a boost.

The App Store description for GETTR claims that the platform is “a non-bias [sic] social network for people all over the world” which aims to “allow anyone to express their opinion freely.” The app has been live since mid-June with its latest update launching on Wednesday. Trending hashtags on the platform include “#trump,” “#virusorigin,” “#nra” and “#unrestrictedbioweapon,” Politico reports. Fun stuff.

Not that I am encouraging anyone named Jack to file a lawsuit, but GETTR’s interface is remarkably similar to Twitter’s, with the only noticeable difference being the color scheme and the number of characters one seems to be able to use for a single post. In one app Store preview photo, the character limit seems to allow for posts over 700 characters, which is good news for Donal Trump and his late-night word salads.

Out of morbid curiosity, I downloaded GETTR and found Donald Trump’s account which has a single tweet…or a GEET? Not sure what they are calling it, but the account has 2,000 followers.

In the responses to Trump’s sole post, is, I assume, a fake account posing as author J.K Rowling also with one post which just says, “#ihatetrannies” about 20 times. Predictably, there seems to be little to no content moderation or security on the app.

The truly confusing thing about GETTR—apart from its name—is that some of the posts from users date back to 2018, before the platform existed; they also include “retweets” from accounts that don’t exist on GETTR.

I followed this poisonous bread crumb trail to one verified user, Mark Latchman, and compared his GETTR feed with his Twitter feed. They’re exactly the same. As it turns out, if you sign up for GETTR using the same username that you have on Twitter, you “may be able to import copies of your content” over to the new platform. In other words, this is the Spiderman meme come to life but with hate speech.

But seriously, when is one of these guys going to do a 1,400 character thread on what “GETTR” means?