Banned from Facebook, Twitter and other major social media after the assault on Congress, the ‘Trump world’ now lands on Gettr, a social media created by exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, longtime friend and sponsor of Steve Bannon . Originally born as a platform, in Chinese, to give voice to dissent to the Chinese Communist Party, in recent days Gettr has been born to new life, becoming a space for supporters of the former president and for the spread of the message of the Maga, the movement of the Make America Great Again by which Trump intends to control the Republican party.
After a video communication, in Chinese, by Guo to the old users, yesterday it was one of Trump’s advisors, Jason Miller, to announce the birth of this new space on social networks in which to express oneself freely, bypassing the rules and prohibitions of Big Tech. The operation comes after Trump, after banning social media that was an essential tool of his presidency, unsuccessfully attempted to launch his own blog.
Interviewed by Politico, Miller said that Guo “has no formal role” and has not “contributed funding” or participates in the day-to-day management of the platform. “His family’s foundation participates in the international consortium of investors who put in the initial funding,” he later explained.
In fact, the American site still points out, in the Gettr advertisement online there is also the logo of G-TV Media Group, a company owned by Guo and Bannon, and that of G-TV and GNEWS, sites that have been identified as carriers of disinformation on Covid and anti-Chinese propaganda. G-TV Media has a bumpy history, and has been at the center of a federal investigation, by both the FBI and the SEC, into the 300 million private funding allocated to create it.
The friendship between Trump’s former strategist, American ultra-right guru, and the Chinese businessman goes back several years, but it attracted media attention last summer when Bannon was arrested on board. of Guo’s yacht for fraud allegations, for which he was then pardoned by Trump at the beginning of the year.
As for the possible direct relations between Trump and Guo, Politico writes that the businessman in 2019 was one of the members of the Mar a Lago club, now the former president’s residence.