Does Joe Rogan Actually Have 8 Million Followers on Trumpian Social Platform Gettr?

Joe Rogan announced on Twitter Sunday night that he is joining Gettr, a Twitter alternative launched by former Trump adviser Jason Miller. The news was a coup for the site, which celebrated a “tremendous surge in signups” following the influential podcaster announcing his move.

“GETTR, the free speech social media platform which fights cancel culture, welcomed 171,629 new users on Sunday – the biggest surge in single day signups since launching on July 4,” the site boasted. “The tremendous increase in sign-ups was a 782% increase from Jan. 1 and a 1357% increase from the week before.”

The fact remains that Twitter still has hundreds of millions more users than Gettr. Miller’s fledgling platform recently claimed to have more than three million downloads, but Twitter boasts at least 206 million active users.

Given that disparity, you might be shocked to find that Gettr claims that Rogan has more than 8.3 million Gettr followers. That is about 400,000 more than the 7.9 million he currently has on Twitter.

Critics of Twitter took to the platform to boast that Rogan and other right wing stars — like Marjorie Taylor Greene — had bigger audiences on Gettr.

Of course, Rogan didn’t amass a following of more than eight million on a small, upstart social media site in one day.

The truth lies with Gettr’s system for measuring followers: it calculates follower count by importing a user’s Twitter followers.

If you click on the “Followers” page of Rogan’s account, you’ll see a disclaimer noting “@joerogan also has 7.9M followers from Twitter.”

In an interview with Mediaite, Gettr CEO Jason Miller confirmed that Rogan’s follower count is a combination of his Twitter and Gettr numbers.

So no, Rogan does not have 8.3 million followers on Gettr.

Another question is why Rogan’s post engagement on Gettr is so much higher than on Twitter. For example: On Twitter, Rogan retweeted a post from Max Blumenthal that got 156 comments, 1.2k retweets and 4.1k likes.

That tweet was automatically crossposted to Rogan’s Gettr account, where engagement surged to 1k comments, 4.8k reposts and 22.7k likes.

Miller claimed that the numbers are organic – to some extent. He attributed the higher level of engagement to Gettr’s crossposting system, which combines engagement from Twitter and Gettr.

Miller also claimed that Gettr is now highly active given Robert Malone and Marjorie Taylor Greene were just booted from Twitter for breaking the website’s Covid-19 misinformation policy.