Elijah Schaffer, the Blaze reporter who queried the GETTR ban of America First streamer Nick Fuentes has been shadowbanned on the platform.
As National File previously reported, Nick Fuentes, the host of popular nightly show America First, was permanently banned from GETTR last month for seemingly no reason:
Fuentes attempted to rejoin the platform multiple times on Tuesday evening, but was banned shortly after each time, even as viewers watched on his live stream.
“If I go on there, and they ban me for being me, well what is that? It’s arbitrary, it’s discretionary, and when they ban groyper, that takes it to a different level,” Fuentes said on his stream, referring to previous reports from the Daily Beast and others that GETTR had banned the term “groyper” from their platform, a name used to describe supporters of Fuentes.
Schaffer, a reporter for The Blaze, was one of the first in the media to question Fuentes’s ban from GETTR, and received confirmation from the Alt Tech site that Fuentes had allegedly broken their terms of service, but they did not respond to his inquiry as to what rules Fuentes specifically broke, or what posts.
“My inquiry was extremely professional and predicated on the basis that the public deserves the right to know GETTR’s threshold for banning users, largely in part due to their users joining to avoid the very censorship practices they seem to be implementing,” Schaffer added, saying that the obtuse nature of Fuentes’s banning made him “suspicious” of the platform.
Eventually, Schaffer received a response from a GETTR spokesperson, who said that they had “nothing more to say” on Fuentes’s ban, other than highlighting that GETTR founder Jason Miller “has been on record many times talking about how [GETTR does] not tolerate hate speech, racism, discrimination, or recruiting for white nationalism [sic] causes” on the site.
Schaffer also included a screenshot of a search on GETTR for his name, which returned no results, despite the fact that he has an account on the platform.
Jason Miller, the former Trump advisor and founder of GETTR, denied that there was any form of shadow banning on their site, and that the terms of service only apply to “what is posted/attempted to be posted on GETTR,” apart from terrorist groups, who are banned automatically.
However, National File was able to confirm through various tests that Schaffer is indeed a banned search on GETTR, something not even rolled out for Fuentes, who can still be looked up on GETTR, despite being permanently banned.
National File also confirmed that despite Shaffer’s apparent GETTR shadow ban, his on-screen “You Are Here” co-host Sydney Watson is searchable on the platform.
In a further series of tweets, the Blaze reporter slammed GETTR, saying that he was more censored on there than he was on Twitter, simply for asking about why somebody received a ban.
“I’m only gonna be real with you guys, I’m disappointed because I wanted and currently want this to be our way out of censorship, but it’s not,” he added.
“Anyone promoting GETTR is grifting or willfully ignorant. Defending banning people is our end.”
Schaffer’s shadow ban and Fuentes’s permanent ban comes the same day as the exposing of past anti-Trump tweets and articles from GETTR’s Global Communications Director, Ebony Bowden, with some being posted as recently as 2021, something Schaffer also pointed out.
Shortly after the 2020 presidential election, Bowden, who was working as the Washington correspondent for the New York Post, claimed that then-President Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud were totally “baseless,” and “unfounded,” despite mountains of evidence at the time that has since been confirmed in states like Arizona. Election integrity advocates have continued to raise serious questions regarding the integrity of the 2020 election…
Unsurprisingly, when pro-Trump protestors entered the U.S. Capitol on January 6, Bowden was quick to condemn them.
Along with retweeting several leftist news reporters, Bowden celebrated the eventual certification of the Electoral College votes for Biden later that day, claiming that “democracy wins today.”…
In June 2018, Bowden declared that Trump’s behaviour at the G7 was “genuinely frightening,” and said that the United States was “careening toward disaster,” while a month later declaring in an article for the New Daily that the then-President’s “American dream is an illusion.”
In November of that year, Bowden described meeting Clinton in New York as a “life highlight,” saying that she had the opportunity to “thank her for everything.”
