Project 2025: Narratives on Alt-Tech Platforms
Gettr and Scored users have shown interest in conservative Project 2025, both voicing support and questioning its authenticity.
TLDR
Project 2025, authored by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, is a set of policy initiatives directed at any upcoming US Republican administration.
Users on the alt-tech platform Gettr have demonstrated sustained, ongoing interest in Project 2025 and have voiced support for its goals.
On the platform Scored, some users seemed to doubt the authenticity and provenance of Project 2025.
Discussions of Project 2025 on Gettr suggest that the grassroots mobilization element of the project may be experiencing some success.
Background
In April 2023, conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation published a report dubbed Project 2025, which laid out policy initiatives for the next incoming Republican administration in the US. The report included directives for an overhaul of climate policy, additional restrictions on reproductive rights, and plans to dismantle the Department of Justice (DOJ), FBI, and Departments of Education and Commerce, among other efforts.
Additionally, Project 2025 sets out to actively recruit, collect information on, and train conservatives to serve in government as a means of ensuring that its policy ideas are passed and implemented with relative ease. Over 100 conservative organizations have signed on to the initiative.1
Open Measures wanted to understand how Project 2025 was being received in right wing circles on alt-tech platforms. To do this, our researchers focused on analyzing data from Gettr and Scored.
Gettr is an American microblogging website co-founded by Jason Miller, a former spokesperson for the Trump administration, that launched in Jul. 2021. The site has attracted users with alt-right political views and is rife with alt-right extremism, racism, and antisemitism.
Scored is an alt-tech platform composed of thread-based forums that operates similarly to Reddit. These sites first came into existence when Reddit banned the subreddit r/The_Donald for violating its policies against posting abusive material,2 and users responded by creating their own site. The site has undergone a handful of name changes. At times, it has used the Top-Level Domain (TLD) “.win”; at others, it has been called Win Communities, in reference to “communities.win” and “patriots.win”. Today, Scored is replete with conspiracy theories and hateful rhetoric similar to content previously posted on r/The_Donald.
Analysis
Gettr
Interest in Project 2025 has been ongoing and sustained, according to information from Open Measures’ Gettr dataset. Since the report’s publication in Apr. 2023, Project 2025 has been mentioned over 400 times on the platform.
Many Gettr users’ comments express positive views on Project 2025. For example, on Mar. 5, 2024, user “ramboscion” posted [sic]:
Project 2025 is the blueprint and President Trump will keep his promises.
In addition to sharing positive thoughts about Project 2025, Gettr users are raising awareness about the plan’s specifics, guiding others to related online educational sessions, and requesting additional information and support toward recruiting new conservatives into government who will enact the plan’s goals.
Scored
Scored had significantly lower levels of chatter about Project 2025, with just 63 mentions since the report’s publication. By Open Measures’ estimation, Scored likely has a smaller user base than Gettr, though many of its comments about Project 2025 have also been positive.
Fascinatingly, on Mar. 30, 2024, a thread was started on c/TheDonald — a subreddit-like community on Scored — about Project 2025, in which multiple users seemed to doubt the report’s authenticity. The thread, titled “They like to call us the conspiracy theorists.. who the fuck has ever heard of "Project 2025" [sic]”, included a Reddit screenshot of a user expressing alarm at the details of Project 2025 (below).
The posts on Scored garnered more than 1,400 upvotes and 300 comments. Intriguingly, many of the comments seemed to support the post author’s premise about Project 2025.
On Mar. 30, 2024, user “Emodius” posted:
Lol idiots. They literally made this up from thin air. So pathetic. God is going to smite these utter [f—. N]o "Trump person" is going to do [s—] to these paranoid fairies[.]
On Mar. 30, 2024, user “Landslide_2020” seemed to insinuate that Project 2025 was an idea from the left, posting [sic]:
Oh Dang. The Left just keeps giving us great T-Shirt and other Memorabilia ideas. I guess it's time for MAGA to Capitalize once again.
On Mar. 31, 2024, user “preferredfault” posted [sic]:
It's not even a conspiracy theory, because a theory has to be based on something. This is based entirely on nothing, fabricated out of thin air. They're also trying to intertwine Trump and religion.....except people from all walks of life, support Trump.
A handful of users did push back against this narrative by correcting that Project 2025 was, in fact, a product of The Heritage Foundation, while still lauding the ideas it contained.
On Mar. 30, 2024, user “JKramer” posted [sic]:
Actually, Project 2025 is a thing and exactly what is needed. It is not however what this communist soy boy is crying about. I have known about it for a while and it is run by the Heritage Foundation. https://www.project2025.org/
On Mar. 31, 2024, user “halberstram24” posted [sic]:
I hate to be that guy, but I’ve heard of “project 2025” many times
On Mar. 30, 2024, user “ballmaster33” posted [sic]:
Project 2025 is real. Order and read the (large) book:
https://www.project2025.org/ .
The plan is to pink slip millions of federal employees and remove as many departments as possible by relying on expanding schedule f.
Join us.
These comments received fewer upvotes compared to those doubting Project 2025’s authenticity or provenance.
Considered together, these interactions raise interesting questions about how users of Scored and other alt-tech communities react critically to new political projects — sometimes even when those projects are ostensibly pro-conservative.
Conclusions
Our research shows that Gettr users are talking about and promoting Project 2025 much more actively than users on Scored, perhaps suggesting that the concerns of various alt-tech communities are somewhat differentiated in spite of any general sense of political alignment.
While Project 2025 has received general enthusiasm in both communities overall, conversations on Gettr suggest that the grassroots mobilization efforts behind Project 2025 may be experiencing some success. Still, the dissent observed among alt-tech users about Project 25 is notable and demands further research.
If you have any research topic suggestions for Open Measures’ researchers, reach out to us below:
Mason, Lilliana, and Thomas Zimmer. “Is This Democracy: 32. ‘Project 2025’: What the Right Plans to Do Once Trumpism Returns to Power on Apple Podcasts.” Apple Podcasts, February 1, 2024.
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Allyn, Bobby. “Reddit Bans The_Donald, Forum of Nearly 800,000 Trump Fans, over Abusive Posts.” NPR, June 29, 2020. https://www.npr.org/2020/06/29/884819923/reddit-bans-the_donald-forum-of-nearly-800-000-trump-fans-over-abusive-posts.