Parler announces re-launch, new CEO
Category: Health, Science & Technology
Via: perrie-halpern • 3 years ago • 14 commentsBy: The Associated Press
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The Twitter alternative has been struggling to return online since Amazon stripped it of web-hosting service on Jan. 11 over its unwillingness to remove posts inciting violence. Google and Apple removed Parler's app from their online stores for the same reason.
Parler said in an emailed statement Monday that it would be led by an interim CEO, Mark Meckler of the Tea Party Patriots movement. It said the service would be brought back online for current users this week with new users being able to sign up next week — and would not be reliant on "Big Tech."
The site's homepage, however, was a single, static page whose lead post reminded viewers of "technical difficulties." While it was possible to log in via a different variation of that URL, Parler's iPhone app did not work, yielding a "networking error" when an Associated Press reporter tried it. Among new posters was Fox News personality Sean Hannity.
How Parler app relaunched online after vanishing following Capitol riot
Guidelines accessible on the site, dated Feb. 14, said Parler would use technology and human review to remove "threatening or inciting content." They said a "community jury" headed by a Parler employee would hear appeals.
Parler was being hosted by a Los Angeles cloud services company, SkySilk. Ron Guilmette, a California-based internet researcher and activist, said SkySilk appeared to be a small outfit and that it was not clear to him whether it could provide adequate security for the site. In particular, Guilmette cited the need for robust defense against denial-of-service attacks, which flood a site with data traffic to make it inaccessible. Such attacks are a threat to any major internet site — especially if their content is at all controversial.
SkySilk did not respond to questions about the level of support the company is providing.
Its CEO, Kevin Matossian, said in a statement that the company "does not advocate nor condone hate, rather it advocates the right to private judgment and rejects the role of being the judge, jury and executioner. Unfortunately, too many of our fellow technology providers seem to differ in their position on this subject."
Mattossian added that his company applauded Parler's new community guidelines.
For a time after Amazon dropped it, Parler received denial-of-service protection from a Russian-based outfit called DDoS-Guard. That ended following revelations that DDoS-Guard had provided services to shady operations, including online forums popular with credit card thieves.
In a lawsuit seeking to force Amazon to restore its service, Parler's management claimed that Amazon aimed to deny Trump "a platform on any large social-media service." That followed Twitter's decision to permanently ban the former president from its service and similar indefinite bans by Facebook and Instagram.
Parler's previous CEO, John Matze, says he was fired on Jan. 29 by the Parler board, which is controlled by conservative donor Rebekah Mercer. At the time, Matze told The New York Times that he'd told Mercer that Parler needed to consider preventing domestic terrorists, white supremacists and followers of QAnon, a baseless conspiracy theory, from posting on the platform.
The 2 1/2-year-old social media site claims 20 million users. Trump never established an account there, although Buzzfeed reported that he considered buying a stake in Parler while he was president.
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Gary Bauer is right. It’s great that this Twitter competition is back. I hope that they sue Facebook for all they’re worth now that we know more planning of 1-6-21 happened there than everyone else combined.
I hope every trump insurrectionist on parler gets hacked and exploited by their russian comrades.
Well the left always said, build or create your own alternative when ever Christians and conservatives complained about our treatment on Facebook, Alphabet, Twitter. Now leaders of our beliefs have done so and the left is even more unhappy. Good!
We're not unhappy. Why aren't you on Parler? Why are you here where you are so discriminated against?
I am. It’s like Twitter not like here. Would you suggest that anyone using Twitter not also be here and just use that instead?
That's a new one. You have to laugh at his abject stupidity.
The neo-Nazis must be very happy that their favorite social media website is back.
No nazis there. Just conservatives who were forced off of Facebook or Twitter or left them voluntarily. I use MeWe for social stuff instead of Facebook whenever I can. We now have a basic social media alternative for all the big Silicon Valley ones and are now building our own e mail and on line financial services so we can’t be cancelled or censored that way either.
nazis, conservatives, white supremacists... tomato, tomatoe...
So glad that the "how low can you go" competition is back on. This had aught to provide the lawyers with quite a bit to do.
I’m just glad to have my Twitter alternative back. Liberals mocking it will only further its spectacular growth.
Were you banned from twitter?
I have no idea. I haven’t tried to use it in a long time. The 140 character limit ever appealed to me. Parler allows 1000 character limits on each post. I’m really happy with what Australia and Poland are doing to big tech social media...
Parler, the echo chamber conservatives frequent so they can feel like someone is out there listening to them only to find out they're just listening to their own whiny cries echoed back to themselves.
Just because no one wants to hear what you have to say anymore doesn't mean your freedom of speech is being infringed. There are plenty of platforms conservatives can still shout their bigoted hate speech, they're really just angry that no one takes them seriously and considers their opinions about as valuable as a truckload of used toilet paper.