As censorship on social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, increases, alternative applications or websites are emerging, allowing users to write anything they want. One of them is Parler, which gained popularity after US President Donald Trump threatened to leave Twitter after the platform hid some of his posts.
Parler has been on the market for two years now, lacking a significant mass of users so far. However, that may start to change. Currently, the alternative network has 1.7 million users, which is twice as many as in April. It is a network dominated by more conservative-minded users who have often lost their Facebook or Twitter accounts due to censorship.
Several prominent American Republicans have also moved to Parler. There is Donald Trump’s son Eric, his lawyer and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, Senators Rand Paul, and Ted Cruz, and the influential National Rifle Association also has an account there.
The founder of Parler is John Matze, who recently spoke in an interview for Forbes magazine. “There will be no fact verifiers. No one will say what you have to think and what you have to say. The police officer will not arrest you for publishing a bad opinion. I think everyone wants this and they like it,” said Matze.
According to him, his social network is currently facing an invasion of ” teenage leftists”, whose accounts he does not seem to hesitate to delete. Matze said that they have flooded onto Parler after the Trump campaign declared that it might decamp from Facebook and Twitter and refocus its efforts through Parler. “They’re trying to get people to have a bad experience and leave,” he added.
However, it is far from the case that only the right is on Parler. For example, several Saudi dissidents found asylum here after leaving Twitter as they began to consider its policies dangerous.
Matze does not have a viable business model just yet. However, he would like to draw the strong faces of conservatives to his network and then connect them with advertisers.
Title image: In this May 30, 2020, photo, President Donald Trump walks across the South Lawn of the White House in Washington. Trump posted identical messages on Twitter and Facebook this week. But while the two social platforms have very similar policies on voter misinformation and glorifying violence, they dealt with Trump’s posts very differently, proof that Silicon Valley is far from a united front when it comes to political decisions. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
