Southampton footballing icon Matthew Le Tissier will break his silence on his departure from the club and the dangers of censorship in an exclusive livestream on free speech platform GETTR on Friday evening at 8pm BST.  
The Saints star stepped down from his ambassador role at the club on Wednesday after he published a tweet questioning mainstream media reporting of the Ukraine-Russia conflict.
 
Le Tissier, a 2022 Premier League Hall of Fame nominee, will tell his side of the story and address the mob outrage and cancel culture surrounding the tweet, which led to his decision to step away from the club.
 
The former Southampton captain, 53, last month announced he was partnering with GETTR to produce exclusive content for the platform, including a livestream series called “Le Tiss Talks,” and in an exclusive interview with the Daily Express warned the U.K. was on the verge of losing its free speech rights.
 
“I think freedom of speech is incredibly important,” Le Tissier will tell GETTR users on Friday.
 
“I believe that everyone has the right to an opinion, and I think we should be able to disseminate for ourselves whether that opinion is valid, or whether that opinion is a load of rubbish, and we should ignore it, which is what most reasonably intelligent human beings would be able to decipher for themselves,” he continues.
 
“I don’t think we need to be spoon-fed information by our media. I think there should be debate and I think the lack of debate over the last couple of years has made me suspicious about why we’re only fed one side of the story. The censorship of doctors and scientists, I think, is wrong. You should be able to hear the dissenting scientists as well because that’s how we move forward. That’s how we move forward as a society, by discussing and finding better ways of doing things.”
 
Le Tissier joins a growing stable of UK free speech stars on the platform, including broadcaster Maajid Nawaz, journalist Andy Ngo, GB News presenter Calvin Robinson, and political commentator Dominique Samuels.
 
In an interview with Daily Echo on Friday, the football legend said he was ditching Twitter for GETTR, calling it a less toxic alternative.
 
"I’ve got a Gettr account, a new social media app that I’ll probably transfer to - not quite as toxic over there,” he said. "I’ll be spending more time on Gettr and Twitter will eventually fizzle out.”
 
Today, GETTR has 5 million registered users across the globe, and is the fastest growing social media platform in history, having marked its first million users less than three days after its formal launch on July 4, 2021. By comparison, Twitter took 24 months to attract one million users while Facebook took 10 months.
 
Other big UK names on GETTR include Conservative MP Andrew Rosindell, GB News presenters Neil Oliver, Dan Wootton, Nana Akua and Calvin Robinson, journalist Andy Ngo, podcaster Joe Rogan, rapper and author Zuby, publican Adam Brooks, presenter and restaurateur Tonia Buxton, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, Free Speech Union founder Toby Young, writer James Delingpole, singer Gareth Icke, businessman Alan D Miller and ex-boxing champion Jamie Moore, plus many more.