Parler, a social-media app is relaunching, which was forced offline following an attack on the U.S. Capitol by then President Donald Trump’s supporters. It says it will relaunch.
The Twitter alternative has been struggling to come back online since Amazon, on January 11, stripped it of its web hosting service over its refusal to delete posts consisting of violence. Apple AAPL, +0.18%, and Google GOOGL, + 0.30% also removed the app for the same reason from their online stores.
Relaunch of Parler app.
On Monday, Parler said in a statement that it would be guided by Mark Meckler, interim CEO of the Tea Party Patriots movement. Parler said the service would return online for current users this week. New users can sign up next week. And it would not rely on “Big Tech”.
However, the homepage of the site was a single, static page whose lead post recalled viewers of “technical troubles”. While it was possible to log in through a discrete variation of that URL, Parler’s iPhone app did not perform, yielding a “networking error” when an Associated Press reporter tested it. Fox News personality Sean Hannity was among the new posters.
Guidelines present on the sites, on Feb.14, said Parler would use technology and reviews to avoid “threatening or inciting content”. “Community Jury” guided by a Parler employee would hear appeals, they said.
Parler was being hosted by Sky Silk, an L.A. cloud service company. A California -based internet researcher and activist Ron Guilmette said Sky Silk seemed to be a small outfit and that he was unsure whether it could give adequate security for the site. Specifically, he suggested the need for robust defense against denial-of-service attacks, which jam a site with data traffic to make it impenetrable. Such attacks are a great danger to any major internet site, mainly if their content is controversial.
Sky Silk did not answer questions about the level of assistance the company is providing.
Kevin Matossian (Its CEO) stated that the company “does not advise nor condone hate, rather it advises the right to private judgment and avoids the role of being the judge, executioner, and jury. Sadly, many of our fellow technology providers differ in their position on this subject.” He added that his company cheered Parler’s new community guidelines.
After Amazon AMZN, +0.48% dropped it, Parler received denial-of-service protection for a time from a Russian-based outfit named DDoS-Guard. That ended following the disclosure that it had provided services to dubious operations, that includes online forams well-known with credit card thieves.
In a lawsuit looking to force Amazon to restore its service, Parler’s management asserted that Amazon planned to deny Trump “a platform on any social-media service.” Then, Twitter decided to permanently ban the previous president from its service and similar indefinite bans by both Instagram and Facebook.
John Matze, Parler’s former CEO, says he was dismissed on Jan.29 by the Parler board, which is managed by Rebekah Mercer. Matze told that he’d told Mercer that Parler needed to think about preventing domestic terrorists, followers of QAnon, and white supremacists to The New York Times.
The two-and-a-half-year-old media sites claim to have 20m users. Trump never made an account there, although BuzzFeed said that he thought about buying a stake in Parler while he was still president.
