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Let’s Talk About Parler
Parler is back online this week after a post-coup hiatus when Amazon stopped allowing the platform to use their web servers and both Apple and Google removed Parler from their app stores. Parler has also announced a new CEO, Mark Meckler, best known for his role co-founding the Tea Party movement.
Per reporting from the New York Times, Parler’s new list of tech providers speaks volumes:
After many large web-hosting firms rejected Parler, the site came back online with the help of a small provider near Los Angeles called SkySilk. Kevin Matossian, SkySilk’s chief executive, said in a statement that he was helping Parler to support free speech. For other services required to run a large website, Parler relied on help from a Russian firm that once worked for the Russian government and a Seattle firm that once supported a neo-Nazi site.
You’ll be shocked to learn that Parler’s current tech infrastructure isn’t exactly reliable, and there have been outages on and off this week. No wonder Parler is suing Amazon. If Parler fails, Amazon’s actions might not be entirely to blame but were absolutely a major factor.
Readers have been asking me to write about Parler since last year, and to be honest, I’ve avoided it. I’ve had an account for a while now and, of all the right-wing social networks I’ve seen come and go over the past five years, Parler is the most redundant and pointless of them all.
The most interesting thing about Parler, to me anyway, was the slick marketing behind making it a thing. Parler co-founder, Rebekah Mercer, clearly called in a lot of favors and over the course of a few months in 2020, almost every Republican politician and right-wing influencer made a big show of announcing that they were joining Parler, or leaving Twitter for Parler. As a result, and probably with the help of a good public relations firm, Parler got a lot of mainstream press about being the social media platform that all the cool kids on the Right were flocking to.
Parler was the Fyre Festival of pro-Trump Internet. It relied on influencer-driven marketing, curiosity, and aspiration. Sure anyone could sign up, but Parler was marketed as the place to be, where all the cool MAGA kids were hanging out.
