Topologies and Tribulations of Gettr : A month in the life of a new alt-network
Gettr is a far-right social network largely modeled after Twitter. It was launched on July 1, 2021 by former Donald Trump spokesman Jason Miller and promoted and partially financed by Miles Guo,1 a fugitive Chinese billionaire allied with Steve Bannon2 and frequent purveyor of anti-CCP content and COVID-19 misinformation.3 Gettr went through several iterations before its July launch: the platform was under development by a Guo-linked development team since at least early February4 under the name “Getter”5 and previously launched as the Chinese app “Getome” in June.6,7 Very little is known about Gettr’s moderation practices and Trust and Safety team (if one exists). Its Terms of Service forbid content which is “unlawful, offensive, obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, pornographic, violent, threatening, harassing, or abusive, or that violate any right of any third-party.”8 In practice, Gettr appears to have few meaningful mechanisms to enforce this. Immediately after launch, SIO researchers observed comment threads bombed with explicit anime, which would have been detectable with sensitive content detection models. These comments were eventually removed, but accounts posting them were not suspended.