GETTR, the new social media network bankrolled by Chinese billionaire and expat Miles Guo and represented publicly by former Trump spokesman Jason Miller, lied about its user count, and has no methods in place to stop the proliferation of spam and child pornography and exploitation, according to the Stanford Internet Observatory.
GETTR launched in July of this year, with its full launch date on July 4, 2021. The Stanford Internet Observatory and Cyber Policy Center notes that it was “launched by former Trump spokesman Jason Miller, with assistance and promotion by exiled Chinese businessman Miles Guo”. Stanford released its “first comprehensive analysis of the new platform” on August 12.
According to this analysis, the parties responsible for creating and promoting GETTR “are not transparent,” because, “While Miller has distanced Gettr from Miles Guo, the app appears to still be developed by a Guo-linked development team.” Additionally, “Gettr appears to have exaggerated its initial growth,” having claimed to reach 1 million users within its first month. In reality, Stanford asserts “that Gettr reached 1.5m users in August 2021, while Jason Miller claimed Gettr surpassed this number in mid-July.”
Perhaps more troubling, Stanford finds that GETTR has “Very few – if any – mechanisms for detecting” spam, pornography, or child exploitation content including pornography. “Gettr instead appears to be relying on a community reporting model, which has not proved sufficient,” Stanford adds. In their full report, the Stanford researchers explain that a “survey of images using Google’s SafeSearch API indicates that 0.9% of posts with media and 1.8% of comments with media were classified as likely to contain violent or adult content, and as noted elsewhere, violent terrorist content has also surfaced on Gettr.”
The full report highlights several failings of the GETTR platform and its software. For example, in a section about the most frequently used hashtags, the Stanford researchers note “a successful spam campaign has led to #transrights and #transrightsarehumanrights appearing in the top 10” hashtags. This was “the result of a single user posting the same comment repeatedly, which is apparently not detected by Gettr’s systems.”
Additionally, engagement numbers suggest “that Gettr is no longer growing”. “The rate of new posts per minute has largely stabilized following a decline from the peak on July 5,” only one day after the platform’s official launch date. Comments, too, have largely stabilized. However, there are spikes of both comments and posts on July 25, which the researchers attribute to “spam campaigns.”
The mainstream accounts on GETTR with the most engagement are Dinesh D’Souza, Miles Guo, Jason Miller, the platform’s Support account, Newsmax, Mike Pompeo, Steve Bannon’s War Room, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Under these are “qanon211” and an account apparently purporting to belong to President Donald Trump, “presdonaldtrump.”
When GETTR launched, it was overrun with seemingly suspicious Chinese accounts and reviews that were apparently left by Guo’s supporters. On July 5, an Iraqi hacker compromised the site, and said it was “easy” to break in. The next day, private user information – including location – was accessed by hackers, exposing the locations of 90,000 GETTR users.
While many expected President Trump to join the fledgling platform immediately after its launch, speculation which was driven by Miller’s association with the website, it was confirmed on July 1 that President Trump had no current plans to join the website.