Last month, in a mad rush to punish everyone associated with former President Donald Trump in the wake of the Capitol Building riot that he didn’t incite and that wasn’t an “insurrection,” Big Tech moved swiftly.
Trump himself was booted from Facebook and Twitter, despite being the greatest marketing force for the latter the platform has ever had. And at the same time, Amazon, Apple, and Google got in on the act.
Parler, the up-and-coming Twitter-like platform that was even remotely close to being a rival of the blue bird was itself deplatformed: Apple and Google Play took the apps out of their stores, while Amazon kicked the site off the Internet altogether, incorrectly blaming Parler for being the place online where Capitol insurrectionists plotted their dastardly deed.
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It just so happened that Parler was growing by leaps and bounds because conservative Trump supporters fed up with the censorship and bans began migrating there by the hundreds of thousands. By the time Parler left the ethernet, the platform had grown to 12 million users.
Since then, Parler has managed to reappear online but only as a static page; so — when will the site be live again, wonder its current user base as well as the millions who want to join once it’s live again?
One of Parler’s owners is former Secret Service agent and current top podcaster Dan Bongino, and he gave a bit of a timeline for relaunch during a segment with Fox News’ Sean Hannity Thursday.
“We’re shooting for Monday,” said Bongino. “Monday looks good. Fingers crossed.”
Bongino’s welcome prediction comes amid some turmoil at the tech start-up, as noted by The Daily Wire:
Earlier this week, John Matze announced in a memo sent to employees that he was terminated by the Parler board, saying “Over the past few months, I’ve met constant resistance to my product vision, my strong belief in free speech and my view of how the Parler site should be managed.”
After Matze’s announcement, Bongino “disputed” his claims.
Bongino also put out a video on Rumble, which he also co-owns, explaining the rift:
“I have no personal gripe against John, the CEO, at all; I want to be crystal clear,” Bongino said in the video, posted Wednesday, “but John decided to make this public, not us. We were handling it like gentlemen.”
“We were the ones, in fact, fighting to get Parler back up. There was some really bad decisions made from people on the inside, and listen, this isn’t us airing dirty laundry,” Bongino continued. “This is protecting a company that is absolutely committed to free speech, that I put the last year of my life into. Do you actually believe that someone else was on the side of free speech?”
Later, the former NYPD officer also emphasized that the “relationship with Parler and the CEO did not work out because the CEO’s vision was not ours.”
“Our vision was crystal clear. We needed to get up and fight back, some terrible decisions were made in the past, that led us to getting put down by Amazon and others,” Bongino added.
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Among them: Content moderation and free speech, two things Bongino said Parler would not compromise on.
“We could have been (back) up in a week if we just would have bent the knee and followed all the ridiculous Apple edicts to become a heavy moderation site to the left of Twitter. That’s not what we’re gonna do. … We were a free speech site and will remain as such and that’s why it’s taken so long to get back up,” he said.
