Ex-Trump adviser Jason Miller spruiks ‘the right way’ to counter big tech bias

Former Donald Trump adviser Jason Miller believes many Australians will increasingly gravitate to right wing-leaning social networks as frustration grows with the left-leaning bias of tech giants.

Jason Miller in Melbourne on Monday. Picture: Cameron Stewart

Former Donald Trump adviser Jason Miller believes many Australians will increasingly gravitate to right wing-leaning social networks as frustration grows with the left-leaning bias of tech giants like Twitter and Facebook.

The growth of social networks associated with the populist right in the US has been a key feature in American politics since the defeat of Mr Trump in the 2020 election and his claims that the election was fraudulently stolen.

Mr Miller, the senior spokesperson for Mr Trump in his 2016 election campaign and a senior adviser in his failed 2020 campaign, believes the desire of many voters for more right-leaning social platforms is a Western rather than a US phenomenon.

“The past couple of years have seen the worst political discrimination ever with regard to free speech and I had a front-row seat watching it happen in the US working for president Trump in 2020,” said Mr Miller, who last year founded and is CEO of his own right-leaning social network Gettr.

He said conservative voices were being drowned out by the tech giants “but I see this as a world problem, not just an issue in the US, because in Australia and the UK and all around the (Western) world, the balance between being a responsible democratic state and sliding towards authoritarianism is pretty thin.”

Mr Miller, who said Gettr had almost 6.5 million followers around the world, including 125,000 in Australia, is in Australia to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference Sydney at the weekend.

Gettr is also helping to sponsor the visit to Australia of former Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage.

Gettr’s growth, like that of other US right-wing platforms such as Parler, has been a troubled one. When it was launched in July last year, the platform’s ability to moderate content was too weak to stop people posting terrorist propaganda, racists slurs, pornography and extremist material.

The site, whose mantra is free speech and attacking “cancel culture”, has also been accused of censoring views critical of the political right and of Gettr itself, a claim Mr Miller denied.

He said argues these “growing pains” were now over and the site, which operates on similar lines to Twitter, is attracting heavy traffic.

He is yet to convince the former president to become active on Gettr since he was banned from Twitter in 2020, but he believes that if Mr Trump runs for president again in 2024, he will have to join sites like Gettr.

Mr Miller said he believed Gettr would attract Australians alarmed by the “authoritarian, draconian and socialist” nature of the Covid-19 lockdowns in recent years, which he says wiped out a generation of small businesses and undermined free speech and democracy.

He said he also thought many Australians would be attracted by Gettr’s hardline stance against the Chinese Communist Party, which he described as an “existential threat” to Western civilisation.

“I think the people and the leaders of Australia should be commended for how they stood up to the CCP and it’s tough to do that in this part of the world, in China’s backyard,” he said.

Mr Miller said the problem with the tech giants was they were “picking winners and losers based on the ideology of the person using the platform”.

“The big tech platforms like Twitter and Facebook started off as projects to really bring people together but at a certain point, they want to disconnect people who are not like them,” he says.

“So I want to make sure there’s a platform that supports free speech. I want to smash that ­notion that the only safe speech is heavily regulated speech.’

Despite the growth of so-called alt-tech platforms like Gettr, their following remains only a fraction of sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Mr Miller said he believed that Mr Trump intended to run again for president and that if he did, he was likely to win the Republican nomination.

“The more that it appears that the walls are closing in on president Trump, the more trouble he is in, the more likely he is to run again and to say ‘I’m gonna have to power through this, my job is not done’.”