Gettr

Following his suspension from Twitter in the wake of January 6, the question of where Donald Trump would take his tweets was a matter of much public debate. At the time, his options were limited. The obvious choice was Parler, which had experienced rapid growth in response to Twitter’s censorship. Yet after Amazon pulled its web hosting services over concerns about “hate speech,” the company fast imploded. The only other possibility was Gab, though its reputation as a cesspool of racist bile meant it likely would have been a PR disaster that even Trump would have struggled to weather. Seemingly out of ideas, Trump started an online blog, although that project was short-lived. His only other prospect was to launch a new platform at which he would be the star attraction.

“Start your own social media site,” goes the common refrain when conservatives complain about getting kicked off Facebook and Twitter. Well, now Donald Trump has. On Wednesday night, the former president announced the launch of the Orwellian-sounding “TRUTH Social” and “Trump Media & Technology Group.” “I created TRUTH Social and TMTG to stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech,” Trump said in the press release. “We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced. This is unacceptable. I am excited to send out my first TRUTH on TRUTH Social very soon.

GETTR, a new social media app helmed by former Trump senior adviser Jason Miller, officially launched on July 4 to much fanfare, with more than 500,000 users creating accounts in just a few hours. The app was created in response to gratuitous censorship by Big Tech companies like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and promises not to censor users for their political opinions. Then president Donald Trump was notably banned from these platforms in the wake of the January 6 riot at the Capitol Building. Miller told me during a phone interview the day before the launch that GETTR was 'founded on the principles of free speech, independent thought and rejecting the political censorship and cancel culture that we've seen in US politics in the US media’.