President Trump was kicked out of most social media platforms after his supporters surrounded the United States Capitol. But it remains to be seen how quickly or where – if somewhere – on the internet he will be able to reach his followers.
Far-right Parler was the leading candidate, at least until Google and Apple removed it from their app stores and Amazon removed it from its web hosting service just after midnight Pacific time on Monday.
Parler was unreachable on the Internet at 4:30 am EST.
Parler’s CEO said it could take him offline for a week, although this can be optimistic. And even if you find a friendlier web hosting service without a smartphone app, it’s hard to imagine Parler succeeding in the market.
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The 2-year-old magnet on the far right claims more than 12 million users, although mobile app analytics company Sensor Tower puts the number at 10 million worldwide, with 8 million in the U.S. That’s a fraction of the 89 million followers, Mr. Trump had on Twitter.
Still, Parler can be attractive to Trump, as it is where his sons Eric and Don Jr. are already active.
Parler hit headwinds on Friday when Google pulled its smartphone app out of its app store to allow posts aimed at “inciting continued violence in the U.S.” further facilitate illegal and dangerous activities. “Public security issues will need to be resolved before it can be restored, said Apple.
Amazon struck another blow on Saturday, informing Parler that it would need to look for a new web hosting service starting at midnight on Sunday. He recalled Parler in a letter, first reported by Buzzfeed, which had reported 98 examples of posts “that clearly encourage and incite violence” in the past few weeks and said the platform “represents a very real risk to public security”.
Parler CEO John Matze denounced the punishments as “an attack coordinated by the technology giants to kill competition in the market.” We were very successful too quickly, “he said in a post on Saturday night, adding that it was possible that Parler would not be available for up to a week” while we rebuild from scratch “.
“All the providers, from text messaging services to email providers and our lawyers, also left us on the same day,” Matze said on Sunday on Fox New “Sunday Morning Futures”. He said that while the company is trying to get online as soon as possible, it is “having a lot of problems, because all the vendors we talk to say they won’t work with us, because if Apple doesn’t approve and Google doesn’t approve, they won’t go. “
Losing access to Google and Apple’s app stores – whose operating systems power hundreds of millions of smartphones – severely limits Parler’s reach, while still accessible via a web browser. Losing Amazon Web Services means that Parler needs to strive to find another web host in addition to reengineering.
Meanwhile, another website widely used by the far right, Gab.com, was apparently benefiting from Parler’s problems. Gab tweeted on Monday that “won more users in the last 2 days than in the first two years of existence”.
Although initially advocating the need to be neutral in speech, Twitter and Facebook gradually yielded to public pressure, setting a limit, especially when the so-called Plandemic video emerged at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic urging people not to wear masks, noted the professor of civic media Ethan Zuckerman of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Zuckerman hopes that Trump’s platform will spur major online changes. Among them, a possible accelerated fragmentation of the world of social media along ideological lines.
“Trump is going to attract a lot of audience wherever he goes,” he said. This may mean more platforms with smaller and more ideologically isolated audiences.
Mr. Trump can also launch his own platform. But it won’t happen overnight, and free speech experts predict growing pressure on all social media platforms to contain incendiary speech as Americans take stock of the violent takeover of the United States Capitol by a crowd set on fire by Trump.