Elon Musk faces an uphill battle to restore free speech, fairness and value to Twitter, GETTR Chief Executive Officer Jason Miller cautioned in an interview with ‘Mornings with Maria’ show host Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Monday morning after it was revealed Musk was considering charging users $20 each month for verification which was previously free.

Musk continues to be highly critical of the platform he purchased on Friday for a whopping $44 billion, and is reportedly looking to slash 30 percent of Twitter’s workforce after firing some of its top executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal.

“The real issue here is that Twitter has failed to innovate over the years. They don’t have the livestreaming in the same way that YouTube or even GETTR has. They don’t have the short video format in the way that TikTok or Instagram reels or we’ve launched with Vision, and so they’ve fallen behind and the user experience is just plain poor… It’s really hard to convince people to come back and pay $20 a month now,” Miller said.

[Watch the full interview clip on GETTR]

“I don't know if these 30 percent reductions will even do it, Maria. To try to restore any aspect of trust or confidence in Twitter, they’d probably have to remove everybody and start all over; every coder, every engineer, every single person who’s in the moderation department because Twitter’s brand has become something that’s so fundamentally about free speech for the Left, not free speech for everybody,” he added.

Miller said people who support free speech should applaud what Musk is attempting to do, but predicted users would be reluctant to pay $20 for a subscription to the platform’s failing Twitter Blue service in order to keep their verification. Miller said users were looking for alternatives, as evidenced by the fact that GETTR’s weekly DAU (daily active user) trends were up in all of its major markets last week, including the United States (+5%), Brazil (+25%), the United Kingdom (+10%) and France (+25%).

A new report published last week revealed an explosion in the number of unique visitors to GETTR in the past 12 months, bucking a downward trend faced by competitors across the industry, and doubling the amount of new people visiting the network, making GETTR the only alternative platform to experience growth.

The Comscore data, analyzed by TheRighting and covered by Rolling Stone magazine last week, found that GETTR was the only alternative social media platform which saw its year-over-year (YOY) unique visitors increase between September 2021 and September 2022.