Don't Weep for Parler as Amazon, Apple, Google Pull the Plug

Parler has been completely isolated. The social media platform, which bills itself as a right-wing alternative to Facebook and Twitter, has been dropped by both Google and Apple’s app marketplaces as well as its online host, Amazon Web Services. Without the mobile ecosystem's core distribution channels, capitalizing off a flow of new users from mainstream platforms that have banned President Donald Trump will be much harder—but not impossible. Amazon, Apple and Google each ruled that Parler, by failing to properly moderate user-generated content on its platform, violated its terms of service and terminated their respective relationships. Parler was removed from the app stores this weekend, and went fully offline at 3 a.m. Eastern time today, Jan. 11. While Parler may find a new provider to host its traffic in the coming days, it will have to do much more to appease Apple and Google, which said the app's owners must keep threats, violence and illegal activity off its platform. Tech firms are not the only ones out of the Parler business Parler isn’t the first free speech-oriented app to be cut off by distributors. Gab, a similar site, was removed from the Google Play Store for violating its policies against hate speech in 2017, and Apple rejected its application to appear on its App Store. It was also dropped by web host GoDaddy in 2018 after the company learned the perpetrator of the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre regularly posted on the site. Microsoft Azure, PayPal, Stripe and Medium all severed business ties to Gab at one point or another. But despite this treatment—what it fashioned as censorship—Gab lives on. In the wake of Wednesday’s deadly insurrection on the Capitol, in which pro-Trump rioters stormed Congress and murdered a police officer in an attempt to disrupt the presidential certification process, Parler was seen as a primary organizing ground for the raid. Apple pointed out that “threats of violence and illegal activity” were routinely allowed on the app. The tech giants weren’t the only ones to drop Parler. “Every vendor, from text message services to email providers to our lawyers, all ditched us too, on the same day,” Parler CEO John Matze told Fox News on Sunday. That’s right—even their lawyers left them. What should've been Parler's big moment The irony of the entire ordeal is that Parler should be enjoying a big week. With Twitter banning Trump on Friday evening and purging hundreds of conspiratorial, far-right accounts in the days since the insurrection—and Facebook, Snapchat and Twitch all suspending Trump's accounts until after he leaves office on Jan. 20—Parler was already attracting users who saw these moves as overreach by all-powerful tech giants. It rose to No. 1 in Apple’s App Store on Saturday. Gab was also thriving last weekend, profiting from Parler’s erasure. “So imagine 10% of the United States all visited your website over the course of three days,” Gab’s official account tweeted Sunday night. “That’s what we are dealing with right now. Be patient, we made big progress today.” How much this isolation will hurt Parler is unclear. The platform does not yet carry ads, but it's been temporarily halted at a time of major growth, and its future discoverability has been stifled since it cannot appear on major app marketplaces. Even users who have downloaded the mobile app will not be able to update it once the service returns because of its app store ban. The shift toward moderation In recent years, Facebook and its peers have expanded their content moderation efforts, especially as advertising has become more central to their respective businesses. But toxic information still pervades their platforms, and they’ve been repeated targets of activists, civil rights groups and even major companies for not doing enough to moderate content. For instance, 1,000 advertisers boycotted Facebook this summer over its reluctance to remove hate speech. However, experts believe silencing Trump will do little to impact the bottom lines of Facebook and Twitter, according to The Wall Street Journal. Parler has never been simply a conservative option in a sea of social media companies, but a cesspool of hate speech and misinformation, say critics like civil rights group the Anti-Defamation League. It recently wrote that Parler has “attracted a range of right-wing extremists” including Proud Boys, QAnon conspiracy theorists, anti-government extremists like the Three Percenters, white supremacists and the alt-right. “Holocaust denial, antisemitism, racism and other forms of bigotry are also easy to find." Gab ultimately found a Web host who would keep it online, and so too will Parler. It’ll find new providers for its emails and text messaging efforts, and it’ll even find new lawyers. Perhaps, if it cleans up its act, it could even return to Apple and Google’s stores. But when major corporations all want to stop doing business with a social media company because its idea of free speech is so odious that it leads to a murderous insurrection in the halls of Congress, severing those relationships isn’t censorship. Parler will continue to find an audience and a user base, but the biggest tech firms—increasingly under more regulatory scrutiny about how their algorithms influence society—are under no obligation to play along.

Politics

Don't Weep for Parler as Amazon, Apple and Google Pull the Plug

The conservative app refused calls for moderation—and paid the price

Scott Nover

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Scott Nover