Parler is back. The interim CEO Mark Meckler said it will continue the company’s vision of being a space that protects free speech in a way that is “more firm and entrenched than ever before.” It went back online last week.
“Parler is back up online, and from our perspective, very healthy and robust,” he said. “We don’t answer anymore to the big tech-oligarchy. We run robust, sustainable, totally independent technology from big tech.”
Meckler, an attorney and entrepreneur, hasn’t yet disclosed which service provider is hosting Parler but said in a release that the company has now shifted to a new server farm. Parler’s relaunch is intended to bring it back online for its current users only in the first week, with new users being able to sign up starting the following week. Describing himself as a “warrior for free speech” and “advocate for the First Amendment,” Meckler said that he didn’t initially plan on becoming involved but asked if he could help out behind the scenes.
“What we’ve done now is we’re on independent platforms, we’ve got redundancy,” he said. “So we hope and pray that even in the event of an attack, we’re going to stay up and be robust So we’ve learned from that. And that was probably the one thing that I think is very different today is those redundancies just didn’t exist in the past.”
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Parler was blamed by the national media and Democrats for having fueled the Jan. 6 riots. It was soon shut down when Amazon kicked the platform off its data servers and both Apple and Google removed its app from their app stores. Data collected by the Department of Justice (See story) found that it was posts made on Facebook, Twitter and Youtube that actually fueled the unrest. The Big Tech companies though refused to reinstate Parler however, bringing up calls from free speech advocates on both the right and left of dangerous Big Tech censorship.
Meckler believes big tech sees Parler as a threat, both to their control of speech and to their business models. “Parler, unlike the other platforms, doesn’t view our users as a commodity,” he said. “We don’t monetize their data, and we are building a successful business model. That’s a threat to them, so it’s both about speech they don’t like and free market competition.”
–Alan Goforth | Metro Voice
