The Rise Of Conservative Social Media — With The New Yorker's Clare Malone and Stanford's David Thiel

Clare Malone is a staff writer at The New Yorker who recently wrote about Gettr, a rising conservative social network. David Thiel is the big data architect and chief technology officer of the Stanford Internet Observatory, where he's researched Gettr's usage. The pair join Big Technology Podcast to discuss Gettr — and its counterparts' — potential to take on incumbent social networks. We dig into the network's growth, its funding sources, and how mainstream social network policies open the door for its success. Here's Clare's story: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/can-gettr-become-the-online-gathering-place-for-trumps-gop Here's David's research: https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/topologies-and-tribulations-gettr Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 1:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hello and welcome to the Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Well, with big platforms like Facebook and Twitter banning users like Marjorie Taylor Greene and other conservatives, I think it's time for us to spend an episode talking about what happens after that. And that is the rise of conservative niche social networks, platforms like Parler, platforms like Getter, which we'll talk about in length today. And here to do it with us, we have an amazing one-two combo. Claire Malone is joining us. She's a staff writer at The New Yorker who just finished, just published a story on Getter. Claire, welcome to the show.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  Thanks. Great to be here.

• 1:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Great to have you. And I always love it when we compare journalists with some of their named sources. And here in the house, we have one of that, that exact pairing for you today. David Teal is our other guest. He's the chief technical officer at Stanford Internet Observatory. And he has done some pretty deep research into Getter. David, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So, look, there's been so many different conservative social media platforms. I mean, I can't even list them all, and I've covered this stuff. You know, we've had Gab, we've had Parler, I'm sure that the Rumble, you know, might qualify as another one. And now, there's, there's a new one called Getter. And Getter is, is really taking off.

• 2:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think there's about 4 million users, although David will fact-check me on that. And it's recently added Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and it does seem like it has some promise to become an alternative social network for conservatives. So let's just start with the basics. Claire, I'd love to hear, from your perspective, what is Getter exactly? And why did it catch your attention?

• 3:03Speaker 01

  Sure. I think the easiest way to describe Getter is basically Twitter, but for conservatives. I mean, they, they take umbrage with you calling it a conservative social media site. They, they want, they say it's a free speech social media site, because they're still, I think, trying to get liberals to come on it. But, but in essence, it is basically, it has all the sort of, the interface that you would find on Twitter, minus private messages. It's the same kind of scrolling experience you would get on Twitter. So that's, so you'd be pretty familiar with the interface if you, if you logged on and you're familiar at all with Twitter.

• 3:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it looks exactly like Twitter.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it's, it doesn't, you know, we can, David might have more to say about, like, the news feed on the side and how that, uh, maybe is different from Twitter. I think it's probably maybe a little heavier editorializing on, on what goes into the, the Getter news feed. But by and large, it's, it's pretty, it's kind of cribbing from an already successful social media platform. I got interested in Getter, in part, just because of, uh...

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Trump's many, I don't know what to call it. His, his business ventures or proposed business ventures getting into social media. Obviously, he was, he was banned from Twitter last year. And he's been talking about, you know, starting his own, not just social media network, but, you know, conservative media company. Who really knows what that means exactly? And there's some controversy over the, the SPAC merger for that company. But I kind of wanted to take a dive into the conservative media ecosystem that's developed over the last year as the anger at big tech has gotten bigger from conservatives. And they're saying, well, let's find our own space. And I kind of wanted to do, frankly, for a New Yorker reader or for a mainstream

• 4:57Speaker 01

  media consumer, what does this stuff look like? Who's on there? Who's behind it? So that was kind of the premise of it is like, what is, what is a conservative media ecosystem look like in January 2022, a year after, frankly, the Capitol riot?

• 5:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And let's just pressure test one of the assertions that Jason Miller, who's the CEO, made to you when you spoke with him for the, for the story. He's a former Trump spokesperson with very colorful history. He said that this is going to be something that's going to attract liberals as well. Look at the controversy with Dave Chappelle, for instance, maybe they'd be attracted to a getter. What is your take on whether that is something that, that might actually come to fruition?

• 5:38Speaker 01

  I mean, that's a, that's a thing that I'm very skeptical on. And I, I'm not sure if it made it into the, the final copy, but I, you know, I, it's very hard for me to imagine a max, a mass liberal exodus from Instagram and Twitter. I mean, you know, we've had a lot of reporting over the past decade about big tech and what they're, you know, if it's, if it's free, the product is you. You know, Americans have gotten used to the idea of tech intrusiveness, even if they're, you know. Not happy about it. And I think this the free, you know, Jason Miller had made these

• 6:17Speaker 01

  arguments that like liberals will have a free speech revolution when they start to get canceled or when they get angry at at big tech trying to cancel them. And I think that that's a little bit, that stretches credulity for me. I mean, he brought up, yeah, Dave Chappelle, Nicki Minaj, Madonna. He, you know, we brought up Madonna's nipple being censored on Instagram. But that's not necessarily stuff that I think liberals would rally behind en masse. So it is, it is kind of hard to see, to see that demographic going to get her. I mean, you did see someone like Tulsi Gabbard join the other day. Tulsi

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Gabbard obviously has a different kind of reputation as a, as a liberal politician. You know, she's gotten more fringe as she's, as her political career has progressed. So potentially you could see some people, I guess, in that category of, of left going on to get her. But I do think that, that Miller's, that's, that is certainly the claim that I think is, is hardest to imagine that Miller made.

• 7:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Now, David, I'll get to you in a minute, but Claire, just have one more question for table setting. You mentioned that you wanted to look at this after January 6. What does a conservative social network look like a month after January 6? But why it caught my attention was because we have seen more conservative figures banned over, over the past year. And, you know, when I speak with conservative friends, you know, they certainly know lots of people who've been banned under these broad vaccine misinformation policies and QAnon policies. And so, does it, does a story like this have some more significance because big tech is becoming more aggressive in content moderating and leading people from their networks?

• 8:08Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, I think that the fact that,

• 8:13Speaker 01

  you know, big tech had sort of four years of trying to navigate. They didn't want to offend mainstream conservative politicians. They didn't want to overstep, you know, censoring the president, essentially, or, or, you know, I think that, I think that is a legitimately tricky thing to assess is how do we, how do we handle the president of the United States? And then when January 6th happened and it was kind of this, wow, this is a red line. They did, there was a certain kind of release. One, there was a Democratic president. Two, they had already banned, you know, the Godzilla of social media, right? Donald Trump. And so there was, there was more permissiveness. And I also think it's become in the last year, the bannings have become more,

• 9:00Speaker 01

  more a part of conservative ideology. I mean, I think the interesting thing about modern American, the modern American GOP, modern American conservatism, is it's not particularly ideological at this point. Like, and I mean that about policy ideas. It's more a contrarian ideology. So, the fact that people are, that conservatives are being banned for saying contrarian things about vaccines, contrarian obviously being a light thing about, a light word to apply to medical misinformation. But, but the idea that it's become a central tenet of the GOP that like, people are out to get you is a really significant thing.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  And I think it's, you know, it's, it's probably only going to get bigger in the next year as, as, you know, we see Trump kind of try to reemerge and probably say more, he has a rally this weekend in Arizona. It'll be interesting to see, you know, how that gets covered and what gets snipped out. And I think we're just going to be faced with more and more that on our plates, the kind of how do you handle? What to censor, quote unquote, or how to contextualize misinformation?

• 10:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and it is definitely a party line that we hear a lot from the right. But I do think that there's also some truth to it, that these platforms have become stricter in banning. And that's what really interested me in this story was that I thought that there, you know, if not a sense of inevitability that one of these networks takes off, each one of these bans does, you know, give them a better shot of succeeding. So David, I want to turn it over to you. You know, your background is really fascinating. You've worked at Facebook, if I'm not mistaken. You're at Stanford right now. And so you know a lot about the way that these networks function and what it takes for a network really to take off. So, you know, I'd love to hear a little bit more about, from your perspective, about your background

• 10:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  and then how you started to apply that to see whether or not what was happening inside Getter, you know, is sustainable and is healthy in terms of growth.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  So yeah, I did work at Facebook for about four years and saw a lot of the

• 11:11Speaker 02

  kind of internal machinations around content enforcement,

• 11:17Speaker 02

  platform policy, as well as a lot of the security and safety mechanisms that were in place to try and moderate content, you know, explicit content, extremist content, that kind of thing. At the Observatory, we study a number of different online platforms, both, you know, the mainstream ones, Twitter and Facebook, Instagram, but also we pay attention when these smaller ones pop up and kind of study the dynamics somewhat, try and determine what populations are, you know, active on them,

• 11:58Speaker 02

  what the growth curves look like in terms of both user base and actual day-to-day activity and what kind of content kind of proliferates on those platforms. For Getter, you know, it's a little bit different than some of the other networks that we've looked at, like Parler or Gab, both of which have been around for a number of years. Getter was kind of a very concerted splash at the beginning. It's only been around for a fairly short time and had that huge growth spike right at the beginning. And kind of like you mentioned, the things that will drive adoption on these is any

• 12:43Speaker 02

  moderation, removal, either of content or accounts on those other platforms. With the most recent exception, I guess, being the rather massive signup spike that they got with Joe Rogan going over, who had not actually, not in response to any of his own content removals, but still was able to kind of use that narrative to drive a big subscriber jump.

• 13:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And so from your perspective, what, you know, well, actually, it's interesting having someone who worked at Facebook here to talk about this stuff, the network effect stuff. It seems to me like there are some social networks that are niche that actually take off. Think about Ravelry, for instance, which is a knitting social network.

• 13:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  Pretty active user base. So what does it take to, for a niche social network to take off? And do you see some of those elements present with Getter? Or is this more likely to be a flash in the pan?

• 13:49Speaker 02

  I mean, usually what we see, there's two things that limit growth on these networks. One, you know, when you talk about, oh, there might be this kind of growth in liberal user base on Getter. It's because the vast majority of content on the site is really just mirrored from somewhere else. You know, somebody posts something on Twitter, it gets syndicated to Getter or some other platforms.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  There's very little on the site that does not exist elsewhere in a more streamlined, omnipresent

• 14:24Speaker 02

  way where people are there with all of the rest of their social circle or people that they want to follow. So they've got some hurdles there, which is kind of why they're excited about all these cancellations. Because the more people that are only there, the more potential they have for.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  User growth, you know, rather than this this kind of syndication model. But, you know, the second challenge that they have is just while they say that they're kind of a broad tent, you could tell from any of their marketing materials, any of the newsletters that they send out. It's obviously very conservative.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  And it's the user base has stayed that way, basically conservatives and a tiny group of trolls. And the day to day interactions tend to taper off when you really only have similar people to agree with. And that's your only form of interaction. It doesn't have the same kind of conflict that another social network would have that might actually keep people involved.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's there's a little bit, I mean, to to to David's point, the idea that there's so much content mirroring, particularly from Twitter, basically, kind of at this point, if you're a conservative figure or a conservative politician, having a getter account is almost like virtue signaling. It's basically saying like, I believe in free speech, I therefore have this getter site. But also, like, if you take a look, you know, they've they are just

• 15:58Speaker 02

  Their tweets.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  They're just tweets. They're just tweets. That's that's all it is right now. And it is this weird, yeah, the frisson of excitement of disagreeing with someone on social media, having a really big argument. I think the only time I really saw, you know, in my in my not very long Gettr usage, the biggest, you know, fights or controversies I saw kind of amid conservatives on getter was when Donald Trump said that he'd gotten boosted. And and there was like the video of Trump saying that. And people, you know, are outraged that he was boosted. So that was kind of interesting to see because it was actual like. Disagreement with the party line, for lack of a better phrase.

• 16:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, Claire, I wanted to speak to you about this because I thought about it when I was reading your story. So where do you think we're better off? Do you think we're better off with mainstream networks where you have people that are voicing some of the stuff that, you know, they won't tolerate, some of the vaccine skepticism, for instance, that Marjorie Taylor Greene has been, you know, had been voicing on Twitter that I think eventually got her boosted? Booted, sorry.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Probably didn't get her boosted.

• 17:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Probably not boosted.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 17:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Or, you know, these niche social networks, they're fascinating because you're right, like there isn't the same conflict, which is what tends to build social networks. But on the other hand, you can end up having echo chambers that if it doesn't radicalize, you know, folks, it could, you know, it almost certainly further divides people and ends up, you know, creating a more accelerated problem like the one we have in the country today where we have, you know, people of different political persuasions that just don't seem to be speaking the same language. So what do you think is better?

• 17:40Speaker 01

  I, I will, I will give the coward's answer and say, I have no idea. I do think.

• 17:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Not a coward's answer, by the way. I think it's like totally fair to be like, hey, I don't know about this stuff. I don't, you know.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  Two, I mean, two things that spring to mind. One, kind of the, again, like some of the idea behind the story was there's this whole really flourishing, vibrant, influential, conservative media ecosystem that, you know, you might not know about, dear reader or dear Twitter follower, but is really influential in people's daily lives. I mean, this is a whole separate story and I would encourage people to go seek out some of the ProPublica reporting on Steve Bannon's podcast, The War Room. But that podcast is really influential. It has lots of downloads. I think it's a sort of more, you know, conservative talk radio. There's more, there's a long tradition of that. That's basically what Steve Bannon is doing, right?

• 18:36Speaker 01

  He's, he's, he can talk for three hours, which liberal or conservative is a talent, right? Most of us can't, you know, just talk on end for many hours of the day. But lots of people listen to that and, you know, ProPublica has done some reporting that shows like it's had some influence on these local electoral administration positions because Bannon is basically saying like, we need to go out and change things from the grassroots. So on the one hand. I think it's bad that a lot of Americans don't know what's going on in, yes, the misinformation-filled conservative media echo chamber, and we should know more about it, especially as, you know,

• 19:19Speaker 01

  we're coming into an election year, and I'm sure that will be a big part of everything. On the other hand, I mean, it's funny, I, on Twitter, I think in the last month, they've put up these little, I don't even know what to call it, signposts when they've deemed that the conver- what do they say? It's hard, there are real humans behind this, or something like that. I don't know what it is, but it's basically like-

• 19:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  They're trying to improve conversational health, so you don't end up yelling at people.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  The conversation is maybe intense. Yes.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Yes, thank you, yes. And it's like, you know, no shit, Sherlock. Sorry, Alex, you might, should I retake that without the words?

• 19:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  We're gonna talk about how Rogan reacted to Getter, so we're taking the explicit label.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  This conversation's getting intense. Yeah, this conversation's getting intense, thus I use a bad word. But I mean, you know, are we having better conversations on Twitter? You know, increasingly, I'm sort of, a lot of it is the bigotry of small differences, right? It's liberals getting in fights with each other over sometimes actual issues, but a lot of times ego. You know, I won't name them, but like, I saw a couple prominent, like, politics types yesterday, getting in a really long time-consuming Twitter fight that had absolutely no, like, it was just about their egos, masking it as like a light policy fight. So, I really don't know the answer.

• 20:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  I have like this policy where I like, I won't go, I'll reply once, but not more than once. Like, it never ends up being a good situation. Once you reply, someone else replies, you reply back, the whole conversation's blown up.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Because like, what if you have to go to the bathroom, and then you don't reply for a while, and they're like, oh, look at that coward, they didn't reply to me. It's like, well, maybe I just had to go live my life.

• 21:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's, that's right, yeah. There's no, there's definitely no willingness for folks to give anyone the benefit of the doubt. But most importantly, it just escalates. And, you know, I'm happy to give one answer, but anything beyond that, it's usually, it almost- Always ends up in in bad faith territory. But I, you know, I just want to, you know, hammer home on this point a little bit now that I think about it a little more. I mean, the platforms are are banning. And look, I don't like the spread, obviously, of all this health misinformation, which you've alluded to. But the platforms seem to be very quick to ban people for health misinformation. And, you know, it's happening at a time where the CDC can't get its act together. It seems like it changes its guidance every five days, or maybe even less than that.

• 21:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  And so you end up having, you know, so many folks who like, you know, are maybe expressing displeasure about this or looking at alternatives because they don't trust the CDC. They get booted from a mainstream platform. Next thing you know, they're on Getter. It does not leave us, you know, with with a bigger problem. And and, you know, either Claire or David, I mean, David, you know, you were. Let's toss to David, actually, because you were actually at Facebook. So I'm curious what you think about this this balancing act that the big platforms need to have between how much, you know, conversation can you tolerate? And what are the side effects when you start banning people at mass?

• 22:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's. It is a balance, and I I think that there is actually some benefit in how the platforms have been behaving in the last couple of years. I think that there probably are some times when they've been a little bit heavy handed. But when it comes down to it, when we're trying to control the spread of not just medical misinformation, but other forms of radicalization that clearly took place on Facebook and to some degree on Twitter and other platforms.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  I think containing that into its own community where it does have a harder time leaping out of it does have some benefit. And there have been some very prominent cases where deplatforming has worked rather well. Like, we haven't heard anything from Naomi Wolf for, you know, months, just basically cut off the,

• 23:17Speaker 02

  you know, almost all communication and relegated her to Telegram and these kinds of platforms. So. I mean.

• 23:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, she's not getter also, I think.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  But, you know, she's also been complaining about the the lack of audience that she was.

• 23:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, OK.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  Getting on other platforms. So and she was notorious spreader of medical misinformation. So while it's it's not great that those people are not exposed to newer ideas. There comes a point where the fact that they're pushing and spreading that content so actively themselves that, you know, it can potentially serve a better purpose there.

• 24:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  And and just in terms of, you know, you mentioned Naomi wasn't happy with the audience. Getter keeps throwing out all these big numbers. David, what have you learned in your in your research in terms of like how healthy this network is? In terms of growth and and retention engagement?

• 24:17Speaker 02

  Um, in terms of user growth, we basically had that splash around. You know, July fifth, fourth, fifth. And it was basically just trailing along in very small numbers until this Joe Rogan spike, which was actually, it looks like it's potentially bigger than what they got on launch. So overall, their the growth has been quite low and flat.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  When it comes to engagement, similarly, you'll have those spikes and it'll just kind of hum along at a at a low level. And we also get a lot of users that it seems there's a decent amount of people signing up when they're encouraged to do so, just so that they can have an account, just in case they need it, just in case the people that they're following get deplatformed or they do. But they don't seem to really come back and have a lot of daily interaction. Exactly.

• 25:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and Joe Rogan himself, he talked about like how he has a follower count of nine million people, but that exceeds the number of people on Getter. What, David, you were telling me what, what, what he, how he reacted. He said it was like some, some fuckery going on over there. And then he talked about like, can I actually even like delete my account, which was like fairly surprising, given they've, given that Getter's gone on this PR blitz, talking about how great it is that Rogan's come on.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was interesting because presumably they had a deal with him, which did not appear to include non-disparagement. But, but after that, and I'm not sure the exact timing of this, but I noticed that they have now split out the Getter followers and Twitter followers into separate things in the UI, which, you know, initially they were kind of trying to make things look active and highly followed and, you know, hoping to bootstrap it. But now that they've kind of been pushed to, to pull those two things apart. It's actually interesting, you look at somebody like Tucker Carlson, he has like 368,000 followers on Getter,

• 26:31Speaker 02

  which is surprisingly low. Like if you're not a Tucker Carlson fan, what are you doing on Getter? And, you know, I think the most actively followed person now is Joe Rogan with 1.2 million.

• 26:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Here's, here's one wild stat. Caitlyn Jenner is on Getter. She has 466 Getter followers and 3.5 million total followers. So Joe Rogan, you're right, that is some fuckery.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  They, they told me that they do, they, to, to get, you know, they have the verified V for, it's their version of the blue checkmark. And they say you can get verified just by, if you're verified on Twitter, you're automatically verified on Getter. So there's also a certain amount of like, they're kind of taking the, the, the big tech, you know, check and, and saying like, okay, all right, that works, that currency works here too. So that's interesting.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  Well, initially they were, they were taking all of a user's previous posts via Twitter's API. So you'd have a timeline going back to like 2010, if you tried to archive the posts and people were, would get all confused because it wasn't clear when Twitter imports stopped and when Getter posts started.

• 27:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Claire Malone is here. She's a staff writer at The New Yorker. We're joined also by David Thiel, the chief technical officer at Stanford Internet Observatory. We're talking about Getter and other conservative social networks. Are they going to make it, make it a go? Are they going to actually challenge mainstream social networks? Can they be consistent? After the break, I want to talk a little bit about one of the real mysteries here, which is who is funding Getter? This episode is brought to you by AVPoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data, and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and

• 28:33Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 29:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  And actually, whose idea was it? So why don't we dive into that right after this? And we're back here on the Big Technology Podcast with David Thiel. He's the chief technical officer at the Stanford Internet Observatory and Claire Malone, staff writer at The New Yorker. Thanks both for joining once again. All right, let's start off this second segment with one of the most bizarre things about Gettr, which is who is Guo Wengui? He also goes by Miles Kwak. He may be the funder of this situation. Claire, what did you find when you spoke with them about this?

• 29:51Speaker 01

  Um, I found a lot of evasion, uh, but I mean, Miles, uh, Guo, however you wanna style him, and if you do a Google of him, and if you read enough about him, and it's truly an internet rabbit hole. I mean, this guy has lots of aliases, lots of lawsuits, uh, a, a long relationship with Steve Bannon. Steve Bannon was actually arrested on Miles Kwak's yacht, uh, a couple of years ago. So he, he's an interesting character. He's a, he's a Chinese billionaire, supposedly, who, um, there's been previous reporting that his family foundation,

• 30:38Speaker 01

  provided seed money for Gitter, and I think David can probably speak more accurately to this, but, um, there was a previous Chinese language site called Gidomi that was basically Gitter. Then they wiped it clean and relaunched it as Gitter, the English language site on July 4th or whatever. So there's a lot of, I would say, flashing red arrows that say, Guo Wengui is, is a person who has had a lot of influence in the roots of Gitter. I think, um, you know, there's a lot of, uh, Steve Bannon and Guo

• 31:18Speaker 01

  kind of, kind of have this mutual, uh, dislike of the Chinese Communist Party. So there's a lot of anti-Chinese Communist Party bots on the site. Uh, there's a lot, there's a lot of, there's just a lot of indication that, that this, that this is something that is, there's a, there's a connection going on here. But I think, you know, Jason Miller is reticent to answer questions head on about, you know, was this site originally funded and the brainchild of Guo Wengui? And he's evasive and says, you know, told me, there's no, he has no personal financial stake.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  He also said,

• 31:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's a very interesting evasion.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  It is a very interesting evasion. Um, you know, he said Steve Bannon doesn't have a financial stake, but Bannon is obviously getting a lot of, I think, uh, Clout from the site, for lack of a better word, or it's, you know, it's a, it's a platform for him. But I think David can probably speak more in a more technically astute way about the connections between these two sites, the Chinese language and now the English language.

• 32:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, David, let's hear it, because to me, it's just really unbelievable that you would have a Chinese language site that gets flipped overnight to this, you know, kind of patriotic MAGA site filled with, you know, Trump supporters and railing against cancel culture.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, so in its first incarnation, it was very clear of Guo's involvement. He talked about it and said it was going to be this amazing next big thing. And then kind of at some point, they shifted it over to being getter with two Es and pushed that. And the same accounts were still active when they made that first migration, eventually changing, dropping an E and essentially purging all the accounts that had been there before and relaunching it in the App Store, albeit, if I recall, signed by the same keys with

• 33:21Speaker 02

  like the same organizations listed as the distributors of the applications. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's quite clear that Guo had responsibility for kind of the genesis of it. How much of that has been handed off is not particularly clear. But what we can see is that the development team that works on other Miles Guo related apps like G News, GTV.

• 33:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  And what are those?

• 33:53Speaker 02

  I'm sorry.

• 33:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  What are those?

• 33:55Speaker 02

  They're kind of this Guo centric news outlets. One is more video streaming based, one is more written news based, but with the overall narrative of being anti-Chinese Communist Party. But the same development team works on those apps as also works on the getter mobile apps. So it would appear that, you know, those apps have come from that team originally. They still seem to have some involvement. How much they're really under the direction of every day of Miles Guo is not necessarily clear, but I think it's, it is clear that some of those links are persisting.

• 34:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  It is, you know, just so bizarre to me that, um, you know, a Chinese billionaire who has a beef with the Chinese Communist Party, maybe that's where he found companionship with Bannon, that would make sense, but that he's playing such a big role in right wing American politics. Is that, I mean, I suppose, you know, teach their own, but is that weird? Like, or is it just me saying, you know, this, this doesn't make sense?

• 35:15Speaker 01

  Well, if we've learned nothing from the past, you know, five or six years of American politics, or decade or 20 years, if you want to go back further, uh, there is a certain argument to be made that like populist politics on both the right and left has demonized globalization and China as the great kind of where all your goods that used to be made in America are now made. So I think there is in some ways, there's a simpaticoness of populist right winger Steve Bannon, you know, kind of taking the the anti-globalist, right? Like, we do not like what has happened with, with the death

• 35:54Speaker 01

  of American supremacy and manufacturing. China is an authoritarian state that is, you know, killing the working class jobs in, you know, Michigan and Wisconsin and Ohio. So there is a little, I mean, I do see, there is to me a logic in there of like the populist working class right wing line that is anti-communist Chinese, Chinese party.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  But, you know, I should also say, just as a fun aside, Guo also uses getter to post like workout videos. He's a

• 36:27Speaker 02

  Wearing his sunglasses indoors and a monologue while on an exercise machine.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  It's very funny. He does like rollouts, you know, like ab rollouts on his penthouse balcony. So it's a very funny. It's not just anti CCP propaganda. It's also workout vids.

• 36:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and I saw him. He's pretty, he's getting his money worth if he is funding this because he is featured pretty prominently in like the streaming section of the app. You basically can't scroll down that section without miss, without missing a Guo video.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  And I will say, when I first joined the site, I think I joined it in the afternoon and I woke up the next morning and checked it. And I had hundreds of new followers. Almost all of them were what I assumed to be bots that were Chinese language bots that had like anti CCP. The only thing in English was an anti CCP Chinese Communist Party bio or whatever. So.

• 37:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, essentially I got followed immediately by Rudy Giuliani fan club. So.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 37:30Speaker 02

  I think one other thing that bears noting is that both Guo and Bannon are the founders of a couple of

• 37:41Speaker 02

  organizations, I believe at least one of which is a nonprofit that funded some previous things like the, the research paper that was published claiming that, you know, COVID was engineered. So they've, they've worked together and funded projects in the past. And they do have organizations that they work through, which I can't really speculate as to kind of the evasion about the funding prior, but it's pretty easy for those two to have a stake while not having a direct personal stake, given that they have these organizations that they work together on.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I don't even want to verbally wade into this because I, this is one of those things where I'd want to like go and fact check it. But I think one of their ventures might be involved in a lawsuit. So there's a lot of kind of financial complications. So.

• 38:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, I guess like one of the things I want to ask as we come too close of this second segment is, given the number of people on there, it seems like it's well-funded. Does this thing have a chance of working?

• 38:50Speaker 01

  I think we have to wait and see how, what Donald Trump decides to do. I mean, honestly, I think that like that is Trump ex machina is really actually a thing on all these sites, you know, whether or not he ends up starting his own social media company, which I think people are a little bit dubious about it actually getting off the floor and, you know, becoming something besides a meme stock. If Trump decides to join one of these social networks, maybe it's Parler, who knows? Melania's into, Melania's NFT is powered by Parler, so, you know, who knows? But I think Trump actually joining would be a real game changer because if we're talking

• 39:34Speaker 01

  about, you know, if we're talking about one of the problems is, you know, mirrored content, you know, if Trump were posting on getter, obviously people would cross-post what he posted onto Twitter, right? But you would still be potentially getting, you know, maybe Trump would stream from getter, maybe like maybe there are features or whatever site he would choose, but there would be exclusive content, which we obviously know is like a trend in media anyway, right? Like, you know, you get, you get the exclusive content on one platform and you try to protect that. I think that that is really the thing that could, the sort of single moment that could make a platform, a conservative platform take off.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  But in general, I mean, how the midterms play out will be really interesting. I mean, you see someone like, let's take the Ohio Senate race with JD Vance and Josh Mandell kind of make, basically making their campaigns like Twitter campaigns. You know, what if you had something like that, just like fully go to Twitter, you know, or, you know, fully, you're fully streaming something from Twitter? Maybe that would change the game, but as it stands right now, I mean, I think David's work showing that people just don't engage and the psychology that I think we all sort of intuitively know interacting on social media, which is like... You want to see, it's, it's kind of plays to the base or human instincts of conflict

• 40:59Speaker 01

  and wanting to see and participate in fighting. So it, it doesn't, getter doesn't have that right now.

• 41:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. So basically the best social networks are, you know, have an element of reality television in them. Maybe everybody's their own reality TV actor.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  We all love reality TV.

• 41:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's so good. I, I got COVID over the break and just dosed myself with reality television and, uh, and I can't stop now. It's a really big problem.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  The real opiate of the masses.

• 41:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  But, uh, it is, it's so good. David, is, is Mark Zuckerberg losing sleep over getter? Or, you know, is there any, any way that there, this thing could build itself into like a formidable network with a solid base of daily active users?

• 41:43Speaker 02

  Um, I would say no, and probably not. If anything, uh, you know, for Facebook, it's good if, you know, Trump, for example, were to go and play somewhere else, um, because it would, you know, kind of take the spotlight off them a little bit in terms of, uh, you know, people questioning what they should be allowed to do to politicians and, you know, the, the claim of, oh, I've been completely silenced and can't get a message out there kind of goes away when you, um, have people moving to those platforms. Uh, and for the most part, those platforms are happy to get rid of a lot of the toxicity that, uh, that

• 42:26Speaker 02

  of the people that were deplatformed in the first place. Um, in terms of getter becoming like a major player, I, I think you're right. Uh, it's going to be something that does depend a little bit on what Trump does. It's possible that if he were to join a network like that, uh, that he might bring some of that conflict with him.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  In a strange way, it might actually get a more diverse base of people because they know that's where the fight is. But, you know, he may also end up moving forward with the Truth Social platform. They've already got some of the framework out there. And I think in that case, we look at these other platforms trying to pivot to different things like cryptocurrency, grift, and so forth.

• 43:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  And David, you just said something interesting about how they're willing to not put up with some of the trolls. You know, Getter in particular bills itself as a free speech platform, but it also has like a fairly aggressive moderation policy. Isn't that right?

• 43:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that's happened with Parler as well, where these companies market themselves as very broad free speech platforms and they quickly discover that that's not what they actually want. Not just in terms of ideology, but in terms of content that pops up, all kinds of trolling and porn and stuff like that. So they typically start free speech, start walking it back over time if they see a bunch of trolls or, I mean, I believe they were actively talking about, either Parler or

• 44:13Speaker 02

  Getter was discussing getting rid of left of center accounts that were joining and saying that openly. Yeah, it definitely changes over time and when you look at what they actually action on, it's not quite what people perceive it as being.

• 44:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Claire, what do you think?

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Did you speak with them about this?

• 44:37Speaker 01

  A little bit, yeah. I mean, they obviously got a lot of flack in the beginning for having like porn bots on the site and just like not having a very, I don't think they had many human content moderators at all. I asked Jason Miller about that, you know, and he said, we've gotten more human content moderators. And I tried to, I tried to ask him a little bit about.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  What would, what would you remove from, like, what would count as, like, too much, right? And I think, um, I think the example, David, I would want you to check me on this, but he gave one example of showing video of the aftermath of like a large bombing, where you're basically showing like dead bodies after a violent attack. It might have been after one of the, um, maybe one of the Kabul airport attacks, maybe showing, showing video of that. And he said, we would allow that. Uh, I believe he said, we would allow that. Is that something that Facebook or Twitter would

• 45:42Speaker 01

  put a, you know, I don't know, a content screen over or not allow at all, um, basically dead bodies?

• 45:50Speaker 02

  They would, they would put a click through on it for sensitive content, um, you know, almost certainly. In terms of whether they leave it up, it, it depends somewhat on context. Uh, definitely if people are reposting it with any kind of encouragement, that falls afoul of their, uh, policies immediately. If it seems to be something where it's just being shared for gore value, uh, that would also potentially be taken down. But there are exceptions to a number of those policies for newsworthiness and things like that. So likely that would fall through and just have a click through.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, not particularly controversial. I guess the other two things that spring to mind are like, you know, I saw on Twitter the other day, a user who had in his bio, the N-word, but using it as like the colloquial, I believe he was black and he was using it colloquially. And he was like, Gitter banned me for that. They're not a free speech web, you know, site. And you got the, the Gitter spokesperson replying to him being like, you violated our terms of service. So I think that's a pretty kind of like.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  It was an interesting thing to watch happen on Twitter. I guess the other thing that that kind of has to do with content moderation is like, you know, little things, and I cited this in the piece, like Jason Miller posted basically like a a kind of crass Epstein.

• 47:19Speaker 02

  It was a noose with with Hillary Clinton in it, right?

• 47:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a it was a Hillary Clinton is standing in front of uh like a cartoon Christmas elf that's that looks like he's hung himself in a cell. And, you know, Miller says like, seasons greetings or happy holidays or whatever he said.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  Tis the season.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Tis the season. Thank you. You're my fact checker. So it's it's like, uh, it's like violent, but it's it almost feels like

• 47:52Speaker 01

  like it's like the Charlie Hebdo. Uh, this is a political cartoon and, you know, again, David, I would turn to your to your expertise on this. Would would a Facebook or a Twitter? Put a content screen on that or a or a warning, a flag on that?

• 48:11Speaker 01

  Or is that kind of up to like, this is a this is a political cartoon? I mean, there's a I would say that there's a lot of that variety of joking potentially on getter, like it's a little more off color like, you know, your Midwestern aunt on Facebook would probably get a little squeamish if she ran across that on your Facebook page and maybe she'd report it, but on getter, I'm not sure it's like raising flags.

• 48:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the number of things on getter that are really just, you know, dunks or memes, you can actually look at the, you know, the most frequent replies to posts and or the most frequent contents of posts and it's like just the crying laughing emoji over and over again. Yeah, in terms of how those kinds of cartoons or depictions would be acted on, I from what I haven't seen what you described, but my guess is that, you know, it might, it would probably stay up. I can't think off the top of my head of a policy that.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I I think a lot of these things are like. It's probably in some ways the same baseline content moderation as a Twitter or a Facebook, but there's more just like kind of the off-color joking that probably gets streamed out more on your Facebook news feed or your Twitter news feed because profession, like even if it's a Fox News journalist, they're probably not making the like weird joke, right? They're probably doing a little bit more like either polemic or reporting or linking to a story. And I think that exists less on getter.

• 49:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think what this discussion underscores is that just content moderation is just a very, very difficult thing to, you know, get your head around. Whether you're Facebook or Twitter or a so-called free speech network like getter or gab or parlor, and everyone's doing content moderation and no one has, you know, any good answers. And however, you know, easy it might seem in a 280-character declaration of what a platform should keep up or take down, it's always more difficult in reality. And it's something that that all networks struggle with. And it always seems a lot easier to do it from the outside until you start your own network and then you're dealing with some of these problems.

• 50:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  So we have just a few minutes left. I want to get to a very interesting potential for this network that it might actually end up becoming more popular outside of the United States than inside. So why don't we do that when we come back after the break? So we'll be back right after this here on the Big Technology Podcast.

• 51:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back for one final segment on Big Technology Podcast. Claire Malone is with us. She's a staff writer at The New Yorker. And we are also joined by David Teal, the chief technical officer at Stanford Internet Observatory. So one of the things I found really interesting was while the Trump, Trump and the Trump family is not participating on Getter, the Bolsonaro family is in Brazil, and it's actually quite popular in Brazil. So is there a chance that Getter ends up becoming a social network that actually, you know, goes beyond the ambitions for the US and, and actually ends up becoming, you know, as popular or more popular outside of the country? I mean, Claire, didn't you lead off your article with Miller coming back from some

• 51:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  international trips, try to entice, you know, folks outside of the United States to sign up?

• 52:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, he'd just been in France and he was promoting the app there. He'd been on a, I think during December, he'd been to DC to promote it to Capitol Hill influencers, as he put it. And then he went to France to basically promote it and get right wing fingers, figures to join the site. I mean, he would be, I think he's very upfront in saying like, we see Getter's growth as being global. So pointing to obviously to the Bolsonaro's in Brazil, who, you know, Bolsonaro and his sons have been active users. I mean, basically the places where Jason Miller was kind of pointing out, oh, there's potential for growth here are countries where there is a strong right wing.

• 52:45Speaker 01

  So India is another place that he said is potential, has potential for growth. France, obviously you've got French elections coming up this year. You've got, you know, these, these European right wing candidates who are getting, whatever, they're not getting the majority of the votes, but they're not getting nothing, right? Like this is.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  Potentially a place for them to strike out. So I think it's, you know, it's, it's interesting. It's also, I mean, it's of a piece with, you know, remember when Steve Bannon founded the, the Rome office of Breitbart? It's kind of the same thing. It's like sort of picking your spots and saying, where, where can we make inroads? And I guess from a business perspective, you know, if you're not, if you're not hitting your strides everywhere in the US, you might as well expand outward. So they're definitely, I mean, that definitely seems to be an emphasis. And I would say, you know, David mentioned this earlier, that like getter might, you know, let's say if Trump and the truth, uh, social network plus streaming platforms actually

• 53:47Speaker 01

  come to fruition and getter has to pivot to crypto, or maybe getter pivots to a more international flavor, right? Like maybe Trump's truth media is a very US focused operation, which why wouldn't it be, right? Then all these other sites can say like, great, well, we're going to be the voice of the French right wing, or Modi in India, or Bolsonaro. So, um, yeah, they're, they're going, they're going global.

• 54:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. David, what did you see in the data?

• 54:15Speaker 02

  Um, I mean, no more than 5% of, of the audience that we can see on getter appears to be Portuguese language or from Brazil. There definitely is a presence there and it, you know, happened pretty early on with the rest of the kind of flood of users during the launch. Uh, I think though, that the, I mean, the obvious difference here is that the Bolsonaro's are all still on Twitter and Facebook. Uh, so the, the appeal of a lot of those users is going to be if they were kicked off of those platforms for, you know, whatever they were doing there. Uh, so I don't see.

• 54:59Speaker 02

  It's not a massive user base right now. I don't see a huge amount of growth unless there is a deplatforming of some kind. Right now, the Bolsonaro's are usually pretty careful about what they say in posts on Facebook or Twitter to not violate terms of service, and they save that for live streams where they'll repeat various kinds of misinformation and be a lot more insulting and explicit. But given that Getter is starting live streams as well, there is potentially a scenario where, you know, Jair Bolsonaro gets too many strikes and then, say, gets his live

• 55:42Speaker 02

  streaming privileges revoked or something on Facebook Live. If he were to then do his weekly live streams on a platform like Getter, that I could see driving a whole ton of engagement, and same for other political figures in other countries.

• 55:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Can we end on just this one thing that we've touched on a few times, but it's worth, you know, putting a pin in it, which is the Truth Social, which is the network that Donald Trump is planning to start. I'm surprised to have not seen him on Getter or any other networks. I'm curious what the state of this social network that he wants to build is, and Claire, you mentioned that the Getter folks wanted to offer him a check of millions of dollars to join. So, and what would, I guess, like, so that's a lot of questions, but let me throw one more in, which is what happens when, you know, if and when he inevitably does join one of these networks?

• 56:38Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, Truth Social is a very... Devin Nunes is apparently its CEO, the former congressman from California is supposedly its CEO, but we haven't seen, we haven't heard much from it publicly in the past, I don't know, month or so. So we'll see what happens there. I mean, if Trump gets in the game or joins one of these networks, I do think it is a big bump, but I will say, I don't think it like, completely, I don't think it eliminates...

• 57:13Speaker 01

  Twitter, or, you know, I think it's preposterous to think that Twitter won't be the number one, kind of like, this is how we interact and talk about politics in America. But I do think it could potentially be, you know, let's say if Trump does join one of those networks, I will say, I think the potency of those networks will change, probably for the worse, in the sense of like, the amplification of misinformation would be more potent if Trump joined something like that and had fewer, you know, content moderation restrictions, but also, you know, Jason Miller and Trump are good, you know, they're

• 57:54Speaker 01

  close, right? It's not like Trump is going to be particularly afraid of saying something inciting or inflammatory. So I do think that that is the big worry, and it goes back to these echo chambers that we have, right? Like, you might not be exposed to the misinformation on this site, and the big tech platforms might be happy that all the kind of crazy vaccine misinformation people are gathering on Gitter, but then you do have this problem of like, everyone infecting each other over and over again with the same misinformation or the same, you know, potentially violent or untrue things. So I think that's the

• 58:37Speaker 01

  sort of, the sort of worst-case X-factor of Trump joining one of these is that he gets in 2022, and then as 2024 presidential campaign ramps up, that it becomes like, a bit more virulent, for lack of a better word.

• 58:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, well, I think that's a, I don't want to say good note to end it on, but it's a note to end it on. So Claire and David, thank you so much for joining. You know, I really enjoyed the story, and David, you have a white paper, I'll link both in the show notes. Do you guys want to share where people can find you online, if they want to follow your work? Not if they want to throw it in you or anything like that.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  You could do both, I guess.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  I'm on, well, I'm on thenewyorker.com and also on Twitter at Claire Malone. That's Claire without an I.

• 59:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, great. David?

• 59:35Speaker 02

  You can find all of our research at io.stanford.edu. I am also on Twitter as elegant underscore wallaby. It's a long story.

• 59:46Speaker 01

  Ooh, great, great username.

• 59:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  We'll have to have you back to tell the story. All right, that's going to do it for us here on Big Technology Podcast. Thanks again to Claire and David. Thanks to Nate Guatney for editing and mastering the sound. Thank you to Red Circle for hosting and selling the ads. Thanks to all of you, the listeners, for coming back with us and hanging here every week. Appreciate it. We'll see you again next Wednesday with another conversation with a tech insider, outside agitator. Until then, take care.

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