Several verified accounts on the newly launched pro-free speech social media site GETTR were hacked following its launch on Sunday.
The pages of a number of prominent Republicans, including Miller, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene were defaced, with the hacker posting pro-Palestine messages and phrases such as "@JubaBaghad was here :)"
According to The Verge, the hacker was Twitter user @JubaBaghdad who said it was fairly easy to hack the pages and admitted to doing it "just for fun." However, the hacker problem was immediately resolved by the Trump team behind GETTR. App founder Jason Miller, a former adviser to ex-POTUS Donald Trump, said that the hacker problem was detected and "sealed in a matter of minutes, and all the intruder was able to accomplish was to change a few user names."
GETTR had a soft launch in June and was supposed to officially launch on July 4 to coincide with Independence Day, which Miller said was representative of becoming "independent from social media monopolies, independent from cancel culture" and "embracing free speech."
The new social media platform from Trump's team allows users to host videos up to three minutes long, live video streaming, and posts with up to 777 characters. Its tagline is "Marketplace of Ideas" and its profile on the Google and Apple's app stores say it was "founded on the principles of free speech, independent thought, and rejecting political censorship and 'cancel culture.'"
It also allowed users to import their tweets from Twitter onto GETTR. Miller reported "more than half a million users" had already signed up for the new platform.
According to the Christian Post, Miller welcomed the GETTR hacker problem, saying, "You know you're shaking things up when they come after you." In June, Politico reported that Miller was developing a social media platform geared towards conservatives and Trump supporters.
While he remained with Trump's team, Miller was no longer in a "full-time, day-to-day role." He is one of Trump's longest-serving aides and had worked with the former president for his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns.
Despite this however, it appears that the former president has not signaled any intentions of joining the Trump team's new platform at the moment. He did, however, hint that he will also soon have his own social media platform from which he cannot be banned.
The former president said on Dave Rubin's "Rubin Report" podcast, "There's a lot of platforms out there, that's what we're looking at, getting the right platform, a perfect platform, and I think you'll see something fairly soon," Bloomberg reported.
Back in January, Wired reported that Trump supporters have been seeking out social media platforms that are free from censorship. But as they soon went to Parler after being shunned from Facebook and Twitter, Amazon Web Services took down Parler.
Trump supporters flocked to Telegram, which the report described as a "privacy-first messaging app founded and led by Russian exile Pavel Durov." At the time, Trump-focused channels "experienced unprecedented growth." The former President himself continued sending out messages using the platform.
For now, only time will tell if GETTR will attract the same growth that Telegram did for conservatives or if they will wait it out for Trump's own social media platform.
