Joe Rogan announced on Twitter Sunday night that he is joining Gettr, a Twitter alternative launched by former Trump adviser Jason Miller. The news was a coup for the site, which celebrated a “tremendous surge in signups” following the influential podcaster announcing his move.
“GETTR, the free speech social media platform which fights cancel culture, welcomed 171,629 new users on Sunday – the biggest surge in single day signups since launching on July 4,” the site boasted. “The tremendous increase in sign-ups was a 782% increase from Jan. 1 and a 1357% increase from the week before.”
The fact remains that Twitter still has hundreds of millions more users than Gettr. Miller’s fledgling platform recently claimed to have more than three million downloads, but Twitter boasts at least 206 million active users.
Given that disparity, you might be shocked to find that Gettr claims that Rogan has more than 8.3 million Gettr followers. That is about 400,000 more than the 7.9 million he currently has on Twitter.
Critics of Twitter took to the platform to boast that Rogan and other right wing stars — like Marjorie Taylor Greene — had bigger audiences on Gettr.
Of course, Rogan didn’t amass a following of more than eight million on a small, upstart social media site in one day.
The truth lies with Gettr’s system for measuring followers: it calculates follower count by importing a user’s Twitter followers.