What President Trump’s lawsuit and new app GETTR have in common: the takedown of Big Tech

On Wednesday, President Donald J Trump announced that he will be taking the Big Tech monopoly down. Facebook and Twitter are his two main targets, but the implications of his legal battle will soon be felt in the entire industry.

During his time in office, no amount of partisanship could dampen the impact Trump’s online presence had on the world. He revolutionized how world leaders use social media, garnering over 88.9 million followers on Twitter during his term. But the very same voice has been silenced, with Twitter permanently suspending his @realDonaldTrump handle and many other social media giants muzzling him for life.

Claiming user safety, platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are constantly targeting conservative voices. Instead, many see their actions as surveillance. A growing opinion stands that rather than focusing on legitimate issues, such as content promoting self-harm and harmful identity politics, these social media empires have invested millions into silencing the opinions they don’t agree with.  

They choose to alienate the common man for their political beliefs, while paying out to a select few elite. This has created a world in which the social media giants have become a “de facto censorship arm” of the elites in power, as President Trump said in his speech.

Only time will tell if President Trump’s legal actions will spark a global push on holding Big Tech accountable for their unlawful actions, in the US, the UK, Europe, and beyond. However, the rising attention given to the censorship, shadow-banning, and outright blacklisting of entire communities and political beliefs speaks for itself.  

GETTR CEO Jason Miller, former Chief Spokesman and Senior Advisor of President Trump, has tapped into this frustration with his new social media platform. Created to counter the censorship of ‘big tech’, GETTR is a non-biased social media platform that aims to protect free speech and stand against cancel culture.

Notwithstanding ideology, the GETTR app also aims to be the most technologically advanced platform by the end of the year. The platform’s design ethos is to ensure functionality and features keep pace with user’s thoughts and ideas, not the other way around. The platform allows users to share more and for longer compared to its competitors: everyone who joins, for instance, gets 777 characters, 3-minute upload limits for videos, and a cutting-edge editing feature.

GETTR also addresses the prevailing frustrations of censorship of paid social earners that has seen the defection of Patreon’s highest-profile creator members: Sam Harris, Dave Rubin, and Jordan Peterson.

Via traditional models, monetization abilities and entire livelihoods are lost due to the much-feared label of being ‘unfriendly for advertisers.’ GETTR has introduced a novel tipping feature, meaning users will never be demonetized for their political beliefs. Miller wants to ‘give back control to the people’—users will rest easy knowing that their content will not be lining the pockets of Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey.

GETTR speaks to those who believe that agency is precisely what we have lost with the arrival of our current age. And with already 1 million users signed up since launch on July 4^th, it is evident that Miller has struck a common nerve: those who have lost faith in a system where North Korean government officials can have a Facebook or a Twitter account, but a former democratically elected president can’t.

By suing Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey and their media empires, Trump is waging a popular war against this censorship regime. Backed by the America First Policy Institute, a non-profit focused on supporting freedom of speech, President Trump will be seen by his supporters as defending other free-thinkers in politics, but all global netizens who have been silenced in kind.  

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