Social network Parler, which was forced to go offline after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of then President Donald Trump, says it is being relaunched.
The Twitter alternative has been struggling to get back online since Amazon withdrew its web hosting service on January 11 for not wanting to remove posts that incited violence. Google and Apple removed Parler’s app from their online stores for the same reason.
Parler said in an emailed statement on Monday that he would be led by an interim CEO, Mark Meckler, of the Tea Party Patriots movement. He said the service would be brought online again to current users this week, with new users being able to sign up next week – and would not be dependent on “Big Tech”.
The site’s home page, however, was a single, static page, whose main post reminded viewers of “technical difficulties”. Although it was possible to log in using a different variation of this URL, Parler’s iPhone app did not work, generating a “network error” when an Associated Press reporter tried it. Among the new posters was Fox News personality Sean Hannity.
Guidelines accessible on the website, dated February 14, said that Parler would use technology and human review to remove “threatening or inciting content”. They said that 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 company and it was unclear to him whether he could provide adequate security for the site. In particular, Guilmette cited the need for a robust defense against denial of service attacks, which flood a website with data traffic to make it inaccessible. These attacks are a threat to any large Internet site – especially if their content is controversial.
SkySilk did not answer questions about the level of support the company is providing.
Its CEO, Kevin Matossian, said in a statement that the company “does not defend or tolerate hate, on the contrary, it defends the right to private judgment and rejects the role of judge, jury and executor. Unfortunately, many of our fellow technology suppliers seem to differ in their positions on this matter. “
Mattossian added that his company applauded Parler’s new community guidelines.
For a while after Amazon abandoned him, Parler received protection against denial of service from a Russian company called DDoS-Guard. This ended after revelations that DDoS-Guard had provided services for dubious operations, including online forums popular with credit card thieves.
In a lawsuit to force Amazon to restore its service, Parler’s administration claimed that Amazon intended to deny Trump “a platform on any major social media service”. This followed Twitter’s decision to permanently ban the former president from his service and similar bans indefinitely by Facebook and Instagram.
Parler’s previous CEO, John Matze, says he was fired on Jan. 29 by Parler’s board, which is controlled by conservative donor Rebekah Mercer. At the time, Matze told The New York Times that he 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 ½-year-old social media site claims 20 million users. Trump never opened an account there, although Buzzfeed said he considered buying a stake in Parler while he was president.