When he was president of the United States, Donald Trump repeatedly claimed to have defeated the Islamic State, otherwise known as ISIS. "We have won against ISIS," he said in December 2018, before upping his hyperbole to say that the U.S. military "took over 100 percent" of territory controlled by the militant group in 2019 despite lots of evidence to the contrary. Now it appears ISIS has made its way into Trump territory. According to a report from Politico, the Trump-centric social media platform Gettr has been flooded with Islamic State propaganda.
Feeds in the app have become filled with graphic and upsetting videos of beheadings, memes, and posts that promote attacks against the U.S., as well as photoshops depicting Trump locked away in Guantanamo Bay. Moustafa Ayad, an executive director at the think tank Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told Politico that the Islamic State “has been very quick to exploit GETTR,” organizing on other social media to hijack the site. “On Facebook, there was on one of these accounts that I follow that is known to be Islamic State, which said ‘Oh, Trump announced his new platform. Inshallah, all the mujahideen will exploit that platform,’” he said. Politico reported that it found at least 250 accounts that regularly promote pro-ISIS content, hijacking hashtags and sharing posts from each other to make the content go viral.
