| With Big Tech cracking down on COVID-19 and election misinformation, sites with more permissive posting rules are courting prominent figures on the right.  Photograph by Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP / Shutterstock Gettr may sound like a creepy dating site, but, as Clare Malone reports, it is, in fact, a social-media app that bills itself as a free-speech alternative to Twitter, and which, last week, added one of its highest-profile users to date, the podcaster Joe Rogan. Along with the likes of Parler, Rumble, and Gab, Gettr is “part of a niche conservative-media ecosystem that could see a banner year in 2022,” Malone writes. Yet, for any of these apps to really take off, they’ll need the imprimatur or participation of the biggest fish in the right-wing pond, Donald Trump—and that’s unlikely as long as the former President continues his rather haphazard pursuit of his own conservative Twitter clone and wider media enterprise. Malone, meanwhile, points to another central problem facing these projects and their ideologically insular user bases: “Do these sites work without the heady excitement of owning the libs?” Read the story here. —Ian Crouch, newsletter editor | 
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