We’ve talked about alternative social networks here before – specifically I’ve referred to Gab a couple of times as Twitter for Nazis — but a new one has caught lots of people’s attention. It’s called Parler – that’s P-a-r-l-e-r — French for “talk”.
Parler is a Twitter-like social media platform marketed specifically at political conservatives in the United States. It’s touted as a free-speech platform. In Conservative Republican circles there’s much talk of Facebook and Twitter censoring speech, particularly around incidents where Twitter has labeled Trump’s tweets as being misleading, or Facebook has taken down his political ads, etc. So Parler is supposed to be there to solve that perceived problem.
Now Parler has been around since 2018 – not long mind you – but they really gained notoriety a couple of weeks ago when news broke on Twitter that Katie Hopkins, after being thrown off Twitter, had moved to Parler. Hopkins is the ex-Apprentice-contestant who has gained notoriety for spouting hate speech in print and over the airwaves. She’s incited racial hatred in messages directed at Stormzy and a persistent campaign against Meghan Markle, and lobbed invective at #BlackLivesMatter. But Twitter finally threw her off the platform for attacking victims of child sexual exploitation, and even that only happened after a petition was raised.
It was then reported that Hopkins had moved to Parler, and was using it to raise money on a crowdfunding website, but as it turned out, Anonymous ended up claiming to have opened the account in her name, raising a few hundred dollars, which they said they’d donate to charity.
In an appropriately surreal move, once the fake account was taken down, Hopkins then opened a real account.
As of last year, Parler claimed to have 100,000 users. Facebook claims 2.5 billion. TikTok 800 million. And Twitter nearly 400 million. They gained a good deal of real traction when Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale joined, along with other far right figures like Milo Yiannopoulos. The user base more than trebled in June 2019 with about 200,000 sign-ups from Saudi Arabia. Parler described them as part of “the nationalist movement of Saudi Arabia”. But actually it followed Twitter deactivating hundreds of accounts that pushed Saudi government talking points — Twitter called them inauthentic accounts, and an “electronic army” pushing the government’s agenda.
But several right-wing and conservative figures did join Parler last month, including Donald Trump Jr., Rudy Giuliani, Alex Jones and Ted Cruz.
With crowds like that, you wonder what the day to day user base might be like? Most prominent are Donald Trump supporters, as well as far-right, alt-right, conspiratorial, antisemitic, and anti-feminist users — at least according to their parlezs.
To sum it up, the New Statesman described it as “an echo chamber for hard-right views.” The New European called Parler “an echo chamber where only the shrillest sounds reverberate into the void.”