Former spokesman Trump spox Jason Miller has been pitching the idea of a new, Trump-based social media platform for months. The pre-celebrated notion had some false starts, enthusiasm remained assumed.
Now the theorized service has become a kind of reality, as Miller’s new platform GETTR soft launched on a Thursday, seemingly out of the blue.
The official launch is set for July 4, according to reports; an obvious thematic decision for the service which bills itself (like Parler and other social media alternatives) as the last haven for free speech on an internet controlled by Big Tech oligarchs and dictators. Aside from today and the Fourth of July launch, the app itself has been available in the Apple and Google stores since June, a fact most of us only found out from Politico today.
For a site that kind of jumped out of the gate without warning, there were some surprisingly high follower counts already on some accounts, as GIGN’s Reed Richardson, formerly of Mediaite, noted in some initial tweet reactions.
The numbers match so closely, for Murtaugh as
Tweets are being imported also, as happens from time to time across services. In the one below, you can see that the GETTR framing was also applied to the retweeted CNN tweet, though CNN does not have a GETTR account
Whether those are by design, or serious glitches, or simply temporary funkiness ahead of Sunday’s hard launch we can’t say.
What we CAN say is that a lot of people had a LOT to say about the launch of GETTR. Notably not among those people: Donald Trump.
Trump didn’t endorse or promote the launch of Miller’s service, and shortly after the buzz built, we found out that not only is he possibly uninvolved, he may even still be eyeing a competing service.
However, there does seem to be an automated Trump account sending out messages that Trump is sending currently by email. (Dozens of Trump accounts, actually.) There is a similar automated account for Trump at
There are other odd things to note.
Going to those accounts through GETTR you now find pics of Biden instead of the stock photos, and one of them featured a message that said “Biden won” before it was deleted.
But no weirdness, glitching, or otherwise has stopped the jokes from flowing, that’s for sure. Some meaner than others, but it’s all in good Free Speech.
There were many, many, MANY examples of this joke.
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And plenty more.
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We could go on but I think you get the idea.
Still, you never know, it could take off like gangbusters. Having tried it myself, I can say it’s very much like Twitter in functionality, and mirrors some of the users, their follower counts, their verified status, their actual tweets, and the way you interact with all things.
It’s remarkably like Twitter in another way, too: when you step away from the computer and think about it for a few minutes, you can’t help but shake your head and wonder WTF we’re all doing with our lives these days.