Former Trump adviser and spokesperson Jason Miller launched Gettr as an alternative social media platform to Twitter. It mirrors Twitter’s design with a post feed and trending topics and is available as a mobile app on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. The platform describes itself as “founded on the principles of free speech, independent thought, and rejecting political censorship and ‘cancel culture'”. Following a soft launch on Thursday, Gettr was flooded with pornographic images and animated GIFs, which trended in comments under the site’s welcome message.

More than half a million people registered for the app when it officially launched on Sunday. In the morning at around 8:30, hackers managed to gain access to the accounts of the platform’s prominent members and defaced their profile pictures. The accounts were restored by 10:00, but the following day, a database containing 90,000 Gettr users’ email addresses, user names, status, locations and other details scraped from the platform, was posted online. Security researchers flagged Gettr’s poorly programmed API, which they showed to be riddled with bugs, for the issues.

Gettr’s launch comes after Trump was banned from Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. The social media platforms said the bannings were due to the risk of further incitement of violence following the riot at the Capitol building in Washington DC on 6 January. During the attack, a mob of the former president’s supporters stormed the US Capitol, disrupting a joint session of Congress that met to count the electoral votes and formalise President Joe Biden’s victory. Trump yesterday announced he filed three separate class-action lawsuits against the chief executives of Facebook, Twitter, and Google, alleging they were censoring the right to free speech. The former president demanded the tech companies restore his social media accounts, grant him punitive damages, and ensure other users can’t be banned or flagged by the platforms.