Gettr, the MAGA-friendly social media platform with a recent surge in membership, appears to be on a hacking mission. Or at least, that’s what the business’s reported decision to fire almost everyone in charge of ensuring the corporation isn’t hacked would lead you to assume. According to former employees who talked to the Washington Examiner, Gettr mysteriously laid off its entire cybersecurity team and IT professionals on Dec. 28 and hasn’t replaced any of them since.
According to the source, GETTR, a social networking start-up, fired over a dozen employees late last year, including two key executives and the company’s entire IT and cybersecurity teams, citing rapid expansion and financial issues, according to former employees.
The company’s chief information officer and chief information security officer were among those fired, two of the most critical jobs in keeping a company—particularly a digital company—running efficiently and safely. Even stranger, the firings happened fewer than three months after the roles were filled, according to the Examiner.
A former Gettr employee spoke with the outlet about what they saw as a culture of mismanagement and inefficiency at the software company. “In all my years of handling cybersecurity,” the employee allegedly told the Examiner, “I’ve never seen a corporation this poorly organized from business operations all the way to IT.” “It looks like something out of a high school.” We contacted the IT firm about all of these allegations, and we will update our story if they answer.
The current IT purge is eventually thrown at the feet of Gettr’s financial backer, Chinese billionaire and rightwing mystery man Guo Wengui, rather than Gettr’s CEO, former Trump spokesperson Jason Miller. “Jason Miller had no input on the decision; it was all Guo,” a former Gettr IT executive told the Examiner. The Daily Beast stated last summer that Guo had helped fund Gettr with one of his foundations, and that circumstances indicated that the platform was “Guo’s invention.”
Although the Examiner report states that the company is now experiencing “financial issues,” it’s unclear why Guo would insist on cutting off the personnel most responsible for keeping the platform running. Employees were told that Gettr “could no longer afford to employ them and was undergoing a major restructuring” when they were fired, according to the Examiner.
Wengui (who also goes by the American alias Miles Kwok) is a golden phantom who appears to be involved in a slew of different activities, but why he is interested in any of them is frequently a mystery. Wengui is a Chinese ex-pat who fled the nation in 2014 after being charged with rape and other offences. Since then, he has established himself as an anti-Communist activist and right-wing celebrity. Wengui has become increasingly linked to a tangle of Washington D.C. intrigue as a close friend of libertarian “populist” spin-master and conservative philosopher-king Steve Bannon.
The billionaire was blamed in a 2021 research by social media monitoring firm Graphika for a large misinformation network in the United States intended to raise Covid-19 vaccine scepticism and boost 2020 election conspiracy theories. He’s been described as an anti-China whistleblower, a hidden pro-China double-agent, a corrupt stooge, and a criminal, among other things.