Parler, the social media network for right-wingers who had already successfully alienated their family and friends on other sites, fired their CEO John Matze.
Under Matze, Parler increased membership, courtesy of conservatives obsessed with the idea a dark cabal of liberal technological elites want to censor them on other sites and under the impression of opening a new account elsewhere was a form of protest. After the poorly moderated site went flooded with death threats against Democratic lawmakers and implied as one of main locations Where the Capitol building rebels on January 6 organized and broadcast live his failed coup attempt, Parler’s app was banned from Apple and Google’s app stores, and Amazon has withdrawn its web hosting. Your lawsuit against Amazon is anything but being laughed out of court and the House Judiciary Committee asked the FBI to investigate this. The site has yet to return in any form other than a pathetic “Technical Difficulties” page, which includes letters of support from people like Sean Hannity. Needless to say, things are going well there.
Matze, now a former CEO of Parler, stated in a letter obtained by Fox Business that the company’s board is “controlled” by conservative mega-donor Rebekah Mercer (one of the main financiers) and that he “did not participate in this decision”. He added that the site was only days away from returning to the Internet at the time he was fired.
“I understand that those who now control the company have made some communications to employees and third parties that, unfortunately, created confusion and led me to make this public statement,” wrote Matze. He added that he found “constant resistance to my product vision, my strong belief in freedom of expression and my view of how the Parler website should be managed”, such as “product stability” and increased content moderation.
Although Parler marketed himself as a free speech site, he always had rules – highly selective against things like nudity and profanity which conveniently seemed to be applied mainly against left-wing trolls. It had a bizarre and opaque moderation system, where reported posts were examined by a jury of other members (not exactly a reliable brain) Matze told the New York Times earlier this month, he informed Mercer that the site would never go back online if they didn’t include new tools to ban domestic terrorists, white supremacists and QAnon conspiracy theorists; he said he got “deadly silence as an answer”.
G / O Media can receive a commission
One of Parler’s biggest investors, a three-time failed political candidate and former NRATV host Dan Bongino, more or less confirmed that the site will never ban these people.
By CNN, Bongino said in a Facebook video stated that the “CEO’s vision was not ours” and Matze was being a liar, is “No white knight in this story”, and only an “asshole” would believe him.
Bongino said Parler could have come back in a week if the council had simply “bent his knees and followed Apple’s ridiculous edicts to become a heavy moderation site to the left of Twitter. That is not what we are going to do. “
“We don’t want garbage on our website and we take the appropriate steps to do that, but we are a free speech website and we will remain so,” added Bongino. “And that’s why it took so long to get back.”
With luck, take much, much longer.