Parler is dead, for now. The very loosely moderated Twitter clone — designed to appeal to the sort of people who get kicked off of Twitter — went dark last night after Amazon pulled the plug on its web services.
With its site unreachable, and with Apple and Google both removing the Parler app from their respective app stores, it’s not clear if Parler will be able to rise from the grave, as some other terrible sites have managed to do when faced with similar issues. (I’m looking at you, Daily Stormer.)
Since most of you probably never looked at Parler during its relatively brief lifetime, I thought I’d take a few moments to let you know just what you missed. Here are an assortment of classic Parler posts, as collected by the indefatigable @ParlerTakes on Twitter.
Parler, popular with QAnon cultists and conspiracy theorists generally, was a wonderful source for intriguing facts — or should I say alternative facts:
And then of course there are the violent threats and genocidal fantasies:
Some of this vitriol is aimed at an unexpected enemy of the Parler patriots: the police.
Suffice it to say that Amazon was not terribly popular on Parler after it announced its plans to shut off web services to the site.
There were more than a few edgy opinions:
Parler is where everybody’s favorite self-aggrandizing semi-fascist opinion-haver Milo Yiannopoulos went after being kicked off of Twitter:
Parler was also home to right-wing bloviator Bill Mitchell and his peculiar opinions:
And it’s where L. Lin Wood, the unhinged, QAnon-infected, pro-Trump lawyer, posts his … stuff.
I’m just going to pray that Parler remains down.
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About the whole “The Left is scared of guns” thing, well… Strawmen are so easy to take down and all.
Hooo! That’s quite a meltdown we’re witnessing. Makes me kind of scared, actually.
What even is the difference between Parler and Gab?
@Longest Time Lurker
Gab still has a web host.
@Sheila Crosby:
I don’t think so. If you let them all walk away, you may still be able to round up the brainless cosplayers later, but you lose the ones with serious opsec. And the latter are likely to be the biggest threat.
Incidentally: in the past, multiple “IMSI-catchers” have been detected operating around DC, and there’s speculation that they’re not all run by US government entities. So it’s possible that Russia knows as much as the FBI who was involved, and possibly more quickly. It’s just a thought, as Beau would say.
@Moggie
What leads you to believe that there was anyone there with opsec, serious or otherwise?
@Longest Time Lurker:
Mostly, it’s a marketing difference.
Gab always was ‘Twitter for the Right Wing’, claiming that Twitter itself was a swamp of left-wing attitudes, that sort of thing. It was also rather top-down owned, definitely moderated, and the infighting (between those who liked to pretend they were moderate and those who insisted on saying the quiet parts out loud) started pretty quickly and ended bloodily with several folks effectively booted off the platform there, too.
Parler, on the other hand, tried to claim it was all about ‘free speech’ rather than ‘right wing’, and went to some lengths to try to recruit more left-wing voices at the start. (Mostly unsuccessfully, because anybody with any experience in online debate saw where the ‘freeze peach!’ advocacy was going pretty quickly.)
Parler started later, got a big boost of membership when the Gab wars went into full play (consisting of many of the louder in-fighters of the right wing), and its very deliberately hands-off moderation approach meant that the people who wanted to be violent were never really stopped.
Gab is still around mostly because not only do they moderate things better than Parler (even if a lot of the moderation is pretty much based on ‘are you friends with any of the moderators’) but the previous infighting left them with a smaller and more cohesive set of active members. They’re quite simply no longer the loud threat that Parler turned into.
At least, that’s my take on it.
It’s now being reported that Parler are cooperating with the Feds, and have already supplied information which has led to at least one arrest:
https://www.businessinsider.com/parler-shared-information-fbi-capitol-riot-suspect-2021-1
This won’t make it any easier for Parler to bounce back. Even if they manage to arrange new hosting, their base will probably see this as betrayal.
You forgot the one where Proud Boys posted their long-winded version of NO GIRLZ ALLOWED!