The Daily Signal - New Social Media Platform GETTR Says No to Cancel Culture, Yes to Free Speech

Episode Date: July 9, 2021

Amid the debates over Big Tech companies and censorship, a new social media platform has emerged to champion free speech. The platform GETTR officially launched on July 4 with a mission of “fighting cancel culture, promoting commonsense, defending free speech, challenging social media monopolies, and creating a true marketplace of ideas,” according to the platform's website. GETTR’s promise to users is “you're never going to be censored or deplatformed or cancel-cultured because of your political beliefs,” Jason Miller, a former aide to President Donald Trump and now the company's CEO, said on "The Daily Signal Podcast." Miller joins the show to explain why GETTR is a unique social media platform and to discuss Trump’s recently announced class-action lawsuit against Facebook, Twitter, and Google over censorship.  We also cover these stories:  Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra says it’s “absolutely our business” to know who has and has not been vaccinated against the coronavirus.  The International Olympic Committee and the Japanese government announce that fans will not be allowed to physically attend the Tokyo Olympics, which begin in two weeks, because of COVID-19. The former ethics chief under President Barack Obama speaks out against the current White House ethics plan for the sale of Hunter Biden’s art.  Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Friday, July 9th. I'm Doug Blair. And I'm Virginia Allen. Big tech companies' censorship of users has led some to launch new social media platforms with a commitment to free speech. Getter is one such platform. Similar to Twitter and function, Getter has a mission to defend free speech and push back on cancel culture. Gettor's CEO, Jason Miller, joins me on today's show to talk about the platform and and former President Donald Trump's class action lawsuit against Facebook, Twitter, and Google.

And don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. And now on to today's top news. Health and Human Services Secretary Javier Bacera says it is absolutely our business to know who has and has not been vaccinated. Earlier this week, President Joe Biden said it is now time to go. community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood, and oftentimes door to door, literally knocking on doors in order to get people vaccinated. GOP leaders were quick to respond to the president's comments voicing their opposition to Biden's remarks. Arizona Republican Representative Andy Biggs tweeted Wednesday, in 2021, the nine most terrifying words in the English language,

I'm from the government, have you been vaccinated yet? And Texas GOP representative Don't Krenshaw tweeted, how about don't knock on my door? You're not my parents, you're the government, make the vaccine available and let people be free to choose. Why is that concept so hard for the left? Bacera responded to Biggs and Crenshaw's comments on CNN Thursday morning. Brianna, perhaps we should point out that the federal government has had to spend trillions of dollars to try to keep Americans alive during this pandemic. So it is absolutely the government's, business. It is taxpayers' business if we have to continue to spend money to try to keep people from contracting COVID and helping reopen the economy. And so it is our business to try to make sure Americans can prosper. Americans can freely associate. And knocking on a door has never been against the law. You don't have to answer. But we hope you do because if you haven't been vaccinated, we can help dispel some of those rumors that you've heard and hopefully get you vaccinated.

About 58% of U.S. adults have been fully vaccinated. Vaccine rates remain low in southern states and the Midwest. Following the declaration of a state of emergency on Thursday, the International Olympic Committee and Japanese government announced that fans will not be allowed to physically attend the Tokyo Olympics due to ongoing concerns around the coronavirus. It is regrettable that we are delivering the games in a very limited format, facing the spread of coronavirus infections, said Tokyo 2020 president Seiko Hashimoto during a news conference following the announcement. The priority will be to determine safe and secure games.

The Japanese government had announced months ago that foreign fans would be unable to attend the games, but many in the country still held on hope that local fans might be able to physically view their favorite sports. The new state of emergency is set to take effect July 12th and last through August 22nd. With the Olympics opening on July 23rd and running through August 8th, this means that the games will be held entirely under a state of emergency. Since the start of the pandemic, Japan has had around 812,000 cases and almost 15,000 deaths. Only 15% of Japanese are fully vaccinated. Former President Barack Obama's ethics chief has spoken out against the White House ethics plan for the sale of Hunter Biden's art. President Joe Biden's son Hunter is an artist and the white.

White House has been working to create an ethics plan for the sale of his art. The White House announced Thursday that Hunter Biden will be kept from knowing the identities of those who purchase his art to avoid any ethics pitfalls. Of course, that also means that the public at large will be kept from knowing the names of the buyers. Walter Schaub, the former director of the Office of Government Ethics under Obama, told Fox News that the plan to keep the identities of the buyers from the younger Biden and the public is the opposite of government ethics. Shab voiced his frustration in a thread on Twitter writing, so instead of disclosing who is paying outrageous sums for Hunter Biden's artwork so that we could monitor whether the purchasers

are gaining access to government, the White House tried to make sure we will never know who they are. That's very disappointing. Shab added that nobody ever said secrecy was the best disinfectant. But that's what we have now, and White House officials getting involved in any way other than to request transparency amounts to effectively putting an official stamp of approval on the president's son trading of his father's public service. Shab says the president should encourage his son and other family members to stop using the Biden name for financial gains. During a virtual event on Wednesday, American Federation of Teachers President Randy Weingarten claimed that Republicans were attempting to bully teachers by passing legislation aimed at banning

critical race theory in schools, as well as accusing them of raising the temperature on race relations due to the 2022 midterm elections. Critical race theory, or CRT, is the idea that individuals are either oppressors or victims based on their race. The philosophy has come under increased scrutiny in recent months as more states begin to pass legislation aimed at banning it in schools. Here's Weingarten's comments via Fox News. We have to build, as Dr. Kendi says all the time, an anti-racist society. It's so important. And education, you know, has a vital role to play in this.

We're committed to helping educators understand how to engage with diverse student populations to focus on promoting racial literacy, to enable educators to advocate for racial inclusivity, to change collective practices and policies that impact education outcomes in public schools. That's our work, and we're always learning how to do better, but we have our work cut out for us because there are legislators, mostly, from the Republican Party

who are currently bullying teachers and trying to stop us from teaching, kids' honest history and helping them to think critically about it. Look, maybe they're just trying to raise the temperature on race relations because of the next election, but whatever it is, it's not good right now. They're not given us a chance to engage with our kids in a way that we know we need to and we know that kids need. Weingarten's statements on Thursday follow comments she made during an event on Tuesday, where she stated that her union is preparing litigation and a legal defense for teachers who are punished for teaching CRT.

Here's Weingarten via the American Federation of Teachers' YouTube page. Mark my words. Our union will defend any member who gets in trouble for teaching honest history. We have a legal defense fund ready to go, and we are preparing for litigation as we speak. teaching the truth is not radical or wrong. Distorting history and threatening educators for teaching the truth is what is truly radical. The other major American Teachers Union, the National Education Association, has also made waves for pushing critical race theory in schools. Last week, the union posted a series of assembly resolutions and proposed resolutions on their website that expressed support for teaching CRR. in schools, as well as calling for a rally coordinated between the NEA and Black Lives Matter

on the anniversary of George Floyd's death. Late Tuesday, the resolutions were removed from the site. Now stay tuned for my conversation with Jason Miller, the CEO of the new social media platform, Getter. Do you have an interest in public policy? Do you want to hear lectures from some of the biggest names in American politics? The Heritage Foundation hosts webinars called Heritage Events Live. These events are free and open to the public.

To find the latest heritage events and to register, visit heritage.org slash events. As debates over big tech and social media platforms continue, there is now an alternative called Getter. The social media platform, Getter officially launched on July 4th with the mission of fighting cancel culture, promoting common sense, defending free speech, challenging social media monopolies, and creating a true marketplace of ideas. And today I am so pleased to be joined by the CEO of Getter, Jason Miller. Thank you so much for being here, Jason. Hey, thanks for having me. So tell us a little bit of the history behind Getter

and how it came to launch on July 4th. Yeah, so really what we're seeing here is kind of the convergence of this cancel culture movement that's going on in the U.S. and also the suppression of free speech that we saw so much last year on the campaign trail. I mean, I think really kind of a seminal moment was the suppression of the Hunter Biden story. The fact that Twitter and Facebook and other news outlets

and big tech really coordinated or colluded, to use the Democrats' terms against them, to keep that story quiet. You know, post-election polling shows that one out of every six Biden voter would have reconsidered their vote or thought differently if they knew about the Hunter story and really that broader Biden family corruption.

So that was a big deal on the campaign trail, obviously as President Trump's former senior advisor for both of his two presidential runs. What I saw happen to him following January 6th, the way that his First Amendment rights were taken away, the way that he was deplatformed. I mean, the fact that I know he said this in his press conference, but they'll do it to a president of the United States, they'll do it to you. And they won't even, they won't even blink. And so it started looking, was working kind of both within and outside of President Trump's orbit to figure out how we can get another platform going. I think there have been some alternatives that have put out there,

But too often folks who are kind of the anti-establishment or outsiders are always told, you can have your own platforms, but they're going to look junior varsity. They're going to look inferior. So we want to make sure we had superior technology, but then make sure that we had free speech and some good, robust debate. And so came together with some folks who are developing a platform, and we got it launched in short order. So we already have a million users, fastest social media platform.

ever to reach a million users. And we're including Secretary Pompeo, Secretary Carson, Peter Navarro, you know, Dinesh DeSouza, a lot of good conservatives. And the name, G E TTR, Getter, where does that come from? So initially we're thinking of how we build community. How do we get together? And so we're kicking around and coming up with all these different names. And get together became getter. Just ended up being truncated. It's kind of catchy. And everybody asks the question. So I'm like, hey, if they're asking the question. It must be catchier. They're, you know, it's like, you know, they want to know a little bit more about it. It gets folks inquiring. It sounds like, this is genius. So it's going to be

getter. And so I love it when you get asked that question because it means folks are interested. No, I do love that. Very creative. Now, as far as functionality, does getter operate very much so like Twitter? So certain functions, I mean, you think about the typical social media platforms. Let's say most folks probably describe it as being more of a head-to-head competitor with Twitter. But when you look at it in just to make sure folks haven't checked it out, so Getter, G-E-T-T-R, it's on the App Store. It's on the Google Play Store. Actually, it was number one, even ahead of TikTok on the Google Play Store, did before yesterday. I think it's number two behind TikTok right now, which I had to show my 12-year-old, by the way, and see, Getter is even a bigger deal than TikTok.

And she's like, you know, get lost, boomer. I'm literally, literally shaking. But the, so we have longer post, 777 characters. You don't have to worry about getting that 280. Longer videos, we're at three minutes. And for some content creators, so I'm thinking of, oh, big like the Daily Signal, we can give up to 10-minute videos. So then that way you don't have to go and splice everything up into such short blocks. You can also import all of your tweets into get her.

So your timeline is there. That's key for a couple reasons. One, that's your creativity. That's your hard work and intellectual process. So we can move that so it stays with you. But also think if you were to be deplatformed or canceled from, say, Twitter in the future, you wouldn't have a backup of any sort of all of that. So that also does that.

But we have some really cool things in development, not only a bunch of additional languages that are coming on. We'll soon have direct messages. We'll have notifications. They'll be coming very shortly. We're also going to have a thing called online appreciation and online tipping. So what that means is, again, this is so big for content creators. I usually don't go quite as granular on this, but because this is a pretty smart audience. And you got a lot of content creators who listen to Heritage and Daily Signal.

So that means people who, whether they create videos or they create memes or they write articles, think of the way that things have become decentralized with the substacks of the world or the patrons or things like that. So this means, let's say that Daily Signal has a super exclusive video that you guys put up there online. It's 10 minutes and so on season. Like, you know what? This is really cool stuff. glad to see the work these guys are doing, they can go and hit a coin or dollar sign. We're figuring out the exact icon in the corner. And you can even preset it to where, say, I want to give them

$1 or $5 or $10. And go and contribute toward that. It might seem small, but as you see the move, where people are going to say rumble and things like that to find ways to monetize their online content, we think this is a way that we can draw content creators in. Also, and just go a step further, because I know that there are a number of elected officials who, who follow you guys as well. I'm making it super easy so you can do the same type thing for a candidate and give right to them because there's nothing more than a politician hates or hates more than they go and beg for money or you know, please support me and here's a link to some wind red thing and then people are like, wait, what is this? But same thing, do it, some kind of dollar sign or something in the corner

to where people can click on it and give money to their favorite politician. So that way, if someone has a really insightful pose, so I'm thinking of, you know, the Ted Cruz is the world who have good social media platforms and a lot of hot takes and things that always make like, yeah, Ted, go get them. Then you could just click in that button and go and contribute to his campaign without them having to go and constantly send out some link. And you all are really branding yourself, of course, as a free speech platform. So what are those guarantees that you're making to your users that their free speech will be protected and not censored if they use getter? Yeah, great question. And I will tell you that content moderation and platform moderation is not something that traditionally my life I've spent a lot of time on other than being upset when a lot of my friends have gotten booted off.

But something I've rapidly become an expert in over the past few months. So I spent a lot of time on this. And we do have a robust moderation policy and I'll tell you why. Free speech goes right up to the point when you start to infringe on somebody else's rights. And so, for example, the same way that if you walked into a convenience store, for example, you said you threatened somebody with physical harm, there would be consequences to that. And so the same thing, you can't go and do that online. You can't threaten people physically. You can't use racial epithets and slurs. You can't go and post graphic pictures of pornography.

These are some basic things that we don't want people doing. Where our commitment to the users of Getter is you will never be censored or de-platformed for your political speech. And I think that's very important. So when we think about why people are getting kicked off of Facebook or Twitter or other things, it's simply because their political opinion isn't agreed to by the overlords in Silicon Valley. So people who maybe raise issues with election integrity or people who say, here's a shocker, hydroxychloroquine works. Then they find them so kicked off or, you know, fire Fauci. Next thing you know, they've been, I mean, Lord, I've probably not that one because I say fire Fauci almost every day. and no one's ever tried to kick me off on that.

But you know what I'm saying. Just maybe questioning some of the same mask protocols. And so those are political opinions. And so, again, our guarantee, you're never going to be censored or deplatformed or cancel cultured because of your political beliefs. But yes, we do have both an AI system that works with a human monitoring system. Certain things then get elevated to an executive team. And then some posts even get raised to my attention, which has already happened a number of

times. And so those are we do have some policies in place. And we have to because we want this to be an inviting platform. And we want people to obviously download an account and create one. We want people to come back, want them to have fun. I mean, that's, I'll give you one super quick example. So Dinesh D'Souza, who we've all known for years. I followed him on Twitter. I would never see his posts. And I was like, now he's on Getter and I see everything. You know, populates my timeline. He's this guy is pretty prolific on the social media front. Clearly he was shadow banned. I would never see his content or anything he did on Twitter.

Now I see him all the time on Getter and I like what he has to say. So he's someone I want to follow. When I open up Getter, I'm like, I wonder if Dinesh said anything cool. There are some other people like that that I look forward to. So if we can make Getter fun, we get people coming back, that's the whole goal. That's great. Well, of course, you know, this has been a major issue and on the minds. of many, many Americans for a long time, but obviously increased after January 6th.

I recently spoke on this show with Mark Meckler, the former CEO of Parlor, and we talked about the details of what happened to Parlor, and he specifically raised that, you know, so much of the core of the challenges that they face came when Amazon Web Services stopped hosting them. So for Getter, how are you all, you know, ensuring that something like what happened to Parlor won't happen to you. And what are the web services that you all are using to host your platform in order to prevent, you know, the whole platform being brought down by Amazon. Yeah, great question.

Actually, the, I'm a little bit less concerned on the Amazon front. We are starting with AWS, but we have redundancies in place on that. And so I'm not as concerned on that one. The one that, look, when you, one thing a lot of folks might not, understand is say the difference between Google Play and the Android open system, open environment, applications or operating systems, excuse me, versus iOS with Apple. So if you have an Android phone, you can literally go to a website and download the app. You don't have to go to an Apple store, excuse me, a Google store. You can. And again, like say with Google Play, we've either been

number one or number two for this entire week, which is super exciting. But with Apple, it's a closed system. So they can decide what apps are on or off their entire system. And then once if they were going to remove an app, then it's not going to work with your phone. So take a look at what happened with, with Fortnite, for example. And Fortnite and Apple under a pretty heated battle as we speak. And so I'm not sure the exact status on that, but I know my, again, my 12-year-old plays Fortnite. And so I kind of learned through her on this stuff. So on the web hosting services, that's not something. I mean, We think that our proactive, robust moderation strategy will make sure that we're okay. But look, someone at Apple could wake up on any day and say, we don't want to have you,

and that would be an issue. And there's really no workaround other than the fact they tell folks to get the Samsung Galaxy or the Google Android or something like that. One interesting note on this. So while Apple is the big massive market mover, obviously as far as iPhones, we just got a whole bunch of market research back. And for Trump voters, and again, that's where a lot of this initial free speech, passion is, is on the right of center. We want everybody, but a lot of the passion's right of center. 57% of Trump voters are Android users. And so think about the disparity on that.

So Democrats go much more heavier to Apple. Trump voters go much more heavier to the Samsung galaxy. I mean, I think of both of my parents have galaxies. My mother-in-law has a galaxy. Father-in-law has an Apple iPhone. but you think about that. And so right now we're at a third or web downloads, a third are from the Google Play Store,

and a third are from the Apple store. So Apple's more of an issue than AWS. Jason, I want to ask you, Politico recently wrote a story about Getter's connection to a Chinese billionaire. Would you like to set the record straight for our listeners about Getter's reported connection to individuals in China? Yeah, absolutely. So Miles Guo is a gentleman who is in the U.S.

on asylum. He's someone who's been persecuted and prosecuted by the CCP. There's probably no bigger anti-CC person that I've ever met in my entire life than Miles Woe. But he is not a financial investor in the operation and he does not have any direct day-to-day role with it. Obviously, he's a friend of it. Now, his family's foundation that is UK-based is one of the initial investors. We have kind of a consortium international investors who contributed. But again, to the point that there's literally nobody who wants to go and make sure that we're sharing democratic thought, that we're finding ways to reach people in China, to allow them to talk about democratic messages. And I think in particular, I've had hours and hours of conversations with Mr. Guo about this,

but how do we go and continue to reach out and talk with the freedom-loving people of Hong Kong, for example? And that's something that I've only in the last few years, I've had the opportunity to go to Hong Kong. I think I've been three times in the last three years. One of my favorite cities on the planet. And some of the young people that I met, the company I used to work for, were some of these leaders in this movement, this freedom fighting movement. And these, I say kids only because I'm old now, but, you know, they're young, mid-20s. And they're the ones who are trying to figure out ways to go and organize protests and stand up for their rights. And that really struck me because these are, you know,

quite as church mice that would be in the office. And here they are these freedom fighters, you know, undercover. And I want to make sure that there are avenues for these folks to stay engaged in it. And so this is very much an anti-CC, pro-democracy, pro-freedom. And you look right in our description for the app. Our goal, we want to share democracy and freedom around the world. And there's nothing more powerful than an idea. You get an idea in someone's head that they should have an independent voice.

that they should have freedom of thought and expression. It's more powerful than any weapon. Yeah, well, and that's certainly so much so on the hearts and minds of so many Americans right now, that value for free speech and promoting that. You had mentioned earlier in our conversation about Wednesday's press conference. Former President Trump announced Wednesday a class action lawsuit against Facebook, Twitter, Google, and their CEOs over censorship. Your thoughts on this lawsuit?

I'm not a constitutional lawyer. I just play one on TV. But as far as the prospects of it, I can't speak to that. But here's what I can say on the political front is that, again, President Trump wasn't kicked off of these platforms or wasn't banned because he was repeatedly putting up illegal content or something of that nature. He was kicked off because his political viewpoint was not something that was found acceptable by the social media oligarchs, the social media titans. in Silicon Valley. And out of this desire to de-platform and cancel him, trying to make it so he's not a viable political figure in the future, these actions were taken. I think President Trump is exactly right to go and stand up and fight here. I do hope that there's some aspect of change. Again, I don't know what the courts are going to do. I know that the courts have been pushing back

more and more on the media and on big tech. I will raise one caution flag with regard to, say, Congress for example. Keep in mind that the current governing rules, the DMCA, for example, Digital Millennium Copyright Act, you know, some of the different rules that are overseeing all these platforms were created back in the 90s. And this was before, you know, Facebook was even a twinkle in Zuckerberg or the Winkle Boss Twins's eyes. And the fact, so these are clearly outdated policies. I do worry about relying on Congress to fix anything. I know that's a lot of different than the initial question you asked. But look, most folks in Congress are old white guys for the most part. I don't think they know the difference between a tweet and a truck.

I do worry that if we're relying on Congress, that they could go and screw it up even worse. I'll tell you just Congress, if you're looking to Congress for a solution, oh boy, that's that sometimes that can be a slippery slope. I think the free market is probably going to be a big chunk of that. It's part of the reason why we started getter. People want an alternative. Is Trump on getter? Do you know? So not yet. So I do have real Donald Trump. his handle reserved form. It's in a big, beautiful safe in the corner of my office. I spoke to them on Saturday night after his rally in Sarasota.

And I was like, hey, Mr. President, got your handle all ready for it. And we did sit down with them a couple weeks ago and show him the technology. He was really blown away. It was actually pretty funny because he was looking at the, I gave him an iPhone loaded up with Getter and he kind of held in his hand. He's like, ooh, I haven't done this in a while. He's like, you know, can I go in post right now? And so it was a pretty fun conversation, but look,

President Trump has offers from several different social media companies as far as what he might do. So the one thing I know if we're working for him is that don't push him, let him do it on his timing. So right now, my best strategy is show that it's really cool technology and get all of his friends and allies signed up. So he's like, you know what? I want to get out there. This is some cool technology. So that's what I'm hoping. And for our listeners that are interested in joining Getter, learning more, where do they go? How do they do that?

Absolutely. One of a couple things, go to either the Apple store, the Apple App Store, go the Google Play Store. You can go to getter.com, G-E-T-T-R.com, and you can download the app. It's super easy to sign on. In fact, if you go to the getter.com website, you can go and create your account. Literally, it'll take you about 30 seconds. You don't even have to enter an email address, and boom, you're all signed up. Now, here's the one thing that I will say, though, is if you want to import all of your tweets,

then what you have it's slight when I say slightly longer it took me two minutes as opposed to 30 seconds you do need to pick the same screen name that used for Twitter and they'll do a couple of things that make sure enter the passcode for both and then boom it loads up and populates your timeline with all your previous tweets so getter.com it is fun I love the commentary and the other thing that's kind of fun too is that just a lot of creativity a lot of a lot of funny artwork and memes and things that are people putting up And I think a lot of people just kind of felt disenfranchised over Twitter. Like, you know, this is really kind of run by the, you know, the far lefties. Now, we do want people from all over the spectrum. Here's what I say. If you believe in free speech, we want you on our platform. If you disagree with cancel culture, we want you on our platform. Because certainly not everyone in the country wakes up and says, this is my ideology.

When you think about this being a global platform, if President Bolsonaro is on our platform, Brazil is our number two country as far as activity in this first week. Folks in Brazil don't wake up and say I'm a Republican, or I'm a Democrat. But again, if you believe in free speech and you oppose cancel culture, we think you have a home to getter. Excellent. Jason, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate you coming on. Thank you. You guys rock. Continued success with the podcast and everything. And look forward to downloading and listening. Thanks so much. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to the Daily Signal podcast.

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