They were willing to give up some money, but stuck to their principles; are you absolutely sure you’ve got that right?
I don’t think it was a matter of principles, I think it was a matter of the platform no longer having a purpose if it gave into his demands.
Parler, which has been popular with conservative users, has long promoted itself as a social network that isn’t moderated as tightly as other platforms, so it’s not entirely surprising that it didn’t want to lay down a red line on content, even at the request of its most famous potential user.
Think about it this way. If Trump hadn’t made the demand to censor people, they probably would have exploded in popularity as its membership would have included his willing drones, enough to offset the 40% revenue loss to him. It would also attract other people too who weren’t necessarily his drones based on the name recognition. it would probably also attract people who hated Trump, as they came to the platform to attack him and his cult. But if they were also obligated to block anyone critical of Trump, they’d only have Trump’s drones there. I think they knew that would kill them before too long.
Was the purpose something other than “make as much money as possible”?
It’s possible that they thought that banning Trump’s critics would cost them so many users that the business wouldn’t be feasible, in which case not caving to Trump’s demand was a commercial decision, rather than a matter of principle.
The thought process may have gone like this:
- Trump joins platform.
- Lots of people join platform to yell at Trump.
- Lots more people join platform to yell at the people yelling at Trump.
- Profit.
There’s more money to be made from hosting a rumble than an echo chamber. I’m rather surprised that Trump wanted his critics banned. Nothing keeps the pawns in line like rallying to the defense of their king. Trump usually like chaos; his M.O. is to heat a pot until it boils and look for ways to get pennies from each bubble.
…and instead end up with a burned hand when he tries to reach into a boiling pot to grab pennies.
Aren’t there differences in regulations for moderated vs. unmoderated fora? Like, if they have no moderation at all, then that’s fine, but if they have any moderation, but they allow things like hate speech or incitement to violence, they can be held legally liable?
You think Donald would ever do the actual work?
“My pennies are in the bottom of this pot of boiling water. If someone would reach in there and grab them, they can keep one.”
And then he renegs, and takes all the pennies.
Which as mentioned eslsewhere, is different from any unmoderated or loosely moderated online venue… how? They’re lucky if that’s all that shows up.
That’s exactly what I said.
Not quite true. The Trump Organization is under indictment now for tax fraud, paying rent and other expenses for employees so they could declare them as fringe benefits and not as income. So Trump does pay sometimes; he just finds the shadiest ways to do it, and phrases his instructions so that he can deny them later.
Tim Miller of The Bulwark offers up his take on GETTR, and on the challenges of forum moderation in general, which mostly comes down to……Users….you can’t live with them and can’t live without them. And just when I thought I’d heard all the possible nicknames for Trump, now I can add “The Butterscotch Baron of Bedminster” to the lexicon.
Great article, thanks! A quote:
@ SonicFastFood was not a representative of America’s heritage of innovative and tasty drive-in cuisine, but rather a digital gathering space for furry porn. Of which there is a lot on Gettr.
Look, that’s not my bag of beans but no judgment. If MAGAs are into that sort of thing, that’s cool. But let me just say that during my first day on Gettr I didn’t come across a single substantive exchange of ideas—but I was exposed to a very great deal of Sonic the Hedgehog erotica. What a world.
… Taken as a whole, my Gettr newsfeed was a mash-up of catfishes and spoofs, conspiratorial craziness from real-life right-wingers, racial slurs from anonymous Nazi accounts, and pornographic trolling from (I assume) bored libs. The Algonquin Round Table this is not. The marketplace of ideas was barren.
So apparently the place is so completely infested by the lowest lowlife of the internet that Jason Miller spends most of his time censoring and banning, to no avail. The only one surprised by the fact that any Temple of Trump Adoration is inevitably going to be a cesspool is, apparently, Jason Miller. 
We should have a betting pool on how many Scaramuccis that place will last!
I think that’s rule #1, actually.
I wish they’d rename the app so they could be honest about what it is, and call it GUTTR.
As already noted in several Pit threads, GETTR has already been heavily infested by ISIS jihadist terrorist posts, including ISIS propaganda and videos of beheadings. Some it violently anti-Trump.
I wonder what proportion of those making such postings are actual jihadists and what percent are just anti-Trump trolls.
One of the prolific posters is an anti-Trump troll. She also used to be very active on Twitter before he got banned.
Whichever article I read, didn’t specify clearly if the violently anti-Trump trolls were largely the same users as the violently jihadist ISIS propaganda. I was wondering about that too.
Gettr’s existence thus far has essentially been a speeding of “explaining the Tragedy of the Commons to libertarians”.