The conservative-friendly social network Parler was booted off the internet Monday over ties to last week’s siege on the
It was a roller coaster of activity for Parler, a 2-year-old magnet for the far right that welcomed a surge of new users. It became the No. 1 free app on iPhones late last week after Facebook, Twitter and other mainstream social media platforms silenced President Donald Trump’s accounts over comments that seemed to incite Wednesday’s violent insurrection.
The wave of Trump followers flocking to the service was short-lived. Google yanked Parler’s smartphone app from its app store Friday for allowing postings that seek “to incite ongoing violence in the U.S.”
Apple followed suit on Saturday after giving Parler a day to address complaints it was being used to “plan and facilitate yet further illegal and dangerous activities.” But the death knell came from
Parler CEO
Parler’s lawsuit in a
Parler attorney
Matze has signaled there is little chance of getting Parler back online anytime soon after “every vendor, from text message services, to e-mail providers, to our lawyers all ditched us too on the same day,” he told Fox New Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”
In a Monday interview with
Trump may also launch his own platform. But that will not happen overnight, and free speech experts anticipate growing pressure on all social media platforms to curb incendiary speech as Americans take stock of Wednesday’s violent takeover of the
Organizers of pro-Trump forces are already regrouping in other forums, such as the conservative-friendly social media site Gab, as new actions are planned ahead of President-elect
“Gab and Parler are like hastily put together and less easy-to-use versions of Twitter and Facebook," said
Meanwhile, a group of digital “hactivists" salvaged much of what happened on Parler before it went offline and said they plan to put it into a public archive. One described the operation on Twitter as “a bunch of people running into a burning building trying to grab as many things as we can.”
The effort to scrape Parler's website to download and archive posts, including image files that can be tied to geographic locations, has instilled some fear in Parler users. But law enforcement might have been able to access the data anyway, and experts said the archive does not include information that was not publicly accessible. The cache of data is not yet easily readable by non-experts.
“If this wasn’t done, we would only have fragments and scraps of the information that was on Parler before the takedown,” said
Coleman said Trump loyalists are likely to find other ways to communicate, such as encrypted messaging apps or old-fashioned email lists, but only if they already knew where to find like-minded groups.
Cutting off Parler removes a key recruitment tool for various groups that are connected by Trump's misinformation about the presidential election, Brookie said.
“Parler has been particularly good at bringing more audience into this collective delusion," he said.
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AP technology writers
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