Workshop Proceedings of the 16th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media

Workshop: International Workshop on Cyber Social Threats (CySoc 2022)

DOI: 10.36190/2022.62

Published: 2022-06-01
A Longitudinal Study of the Gettr Social Network
Pujan Paudel, Jeremy Blackburn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Savvas Zannettou, Gianluca Stringhini

This paper presents the first data-driven analysis of Gettr, a new social network platform launched by former US President Donald Trump's team on July of 2021. Among other things, we find that users on the platform heavily discuss societal issues like covid, and politics, with a focus on the Trump campaign in the US and Bolsonaro's in Brazil. Activity on the platform has steadily been decreasing since its launch, although a core of verified users and early adopters kept posting and become central to it. Finally, although toxicity has been increasing over time, the average level of toxicity is still lower than the one recently observed on other fringe social networks like Gab and 4chan. Overall, we provide a first quantitative look at this new community, observing a lack of organic engagement and activity.