After getting locked out of Twitter and Instagram for antisemitic posts the rapper formerly known as Kanye West is offering to buy right-wing friendly social network Parler shortly.
For his opinions with no gatekeeper legally known as Ye, the acquisition of Parler would give West control of a social media platform and a new outlet. Who will listen, the question is?
To support free speech by having looser rules and moderation even among the new breed of largely right-wing, far-right and libertarian social apps that purport, there is no clear roadmap to growing it beyond a niche platform chasing crumbs left by mainstream social media, Parler’s user base is tiny and with competition only increasing for the relatively small swath who want to discuss politics online of mostly older people.
Things may get even more complicated for Parler, if Tesla CEO Elon Musk goes through with his planned purchase of Twitter. Including reinstating the account of former President Donald Trump he would like to loosen Twitter’s rules and content-moderation efforts. Musk has already made it clear that’s because.
Sites like Parler, Gab and Trump’s Truth Social could end up losing users because they felt it was constricting to their political views or because they were kicked off return, who left Twitter either if the libertarian and far-right users.
The acquisition should be completed in the fourth quarter, but the price and other details were not disclosed, Parlement Technologies, which owns Parler, and West said Monday.
Via Parliament’s private cloud and data center infrastructure Parliament Technologies said the agreement includes the use of private cloud services.
Last month to form Parlement Technologies Parler restructured its business, which it said aims to become the “world’s premier free speech technology infrastructure and platform.”
The company wants to provide services to other niche sites that are often deemed too extreme for mainstream tech companies to support, this means that rather than running a single platform such as Parler.
The deal with West was not yet in the works when the company was restructured and the two transactions are separate, a Parliament spokesperson said.
Over antisemitic posts that the social networks said violated their policies Ye was blocked from posting on Twitter and Instagram a week ago.
Making an apparent reference to the U.S. defense readiness condition scale known as DEFCON, in one post on Twitter Ye said he would soon go “defcon 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE”, according to internet archive records.
The COVID-19 vaccine the “mark of the beast” and called slavery was a choice Ye has also suggested. At his collection at Paris Fashion Week earlier this month, he was criticized for wearing a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt.
Ye said in a prepared statement “In a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves”.
According to Data.ai, which tracks mobile app usage from other conservative-friendly platforms like Truth Social, which are tiny as well compared with mainstream social media sites, Parler has struggled amid competition. In the U.S. for the first half of this year Parler had an average of 725,000 monthly active users.
In the first half of 2021 that’s down from 5.2 million. In the first half of this year overall, including people outside the U.S., Parler still failed to reach the 1 million mark.
According to Data.ai, despite launching just in February and only on Apple devices, Truth Social, meanwhile, had 2.4 million monthly users during the same period.
The market research firm said Gettr, another right-leaning platform, which launched in July 2021, is ahead of both Parler and Truth Social with about 3.8 million monthly active users.
During its most recent quarter none of them came close to Twitter, which reported that it had a daily average of about 237.8 million active users. At mainstream services such as Twitter and Facebook, but they have failed to attract users in large numbers, many of the right-wing platforms emerged from opposition to the content-moderation restrictions.
Part of that reason may be that most people don’t actually want to discuss politics online. One-third of tweets sent in the U.S. are political in nature, but these are mainly sent by a small subset of mostly older people, according to the Pew Research Center.
They produce nearly 80% of all political tweets, according to Pew, while Americans ages 50 and older make up 24% of the U.S. adult Twitter population. If the rapper is serious about growing Parler’s user base this is the audience Ye’s Parler would have to be courting.
Until 2020 it didn’t start picking up steam but in August 2018 Parler launched. Earlier that month it was kicked offline in January 2021 over its ties to the deadly insurrection in the U.S. Capitol. Parler announced a relaunch a month after the attack. It returned to Google Play last month.
In a prepared statement George Farmer, Parliament Technologies CEO who is married to conservative activist Candace Owens, said that “This deal will change the world, and change the way the world thinks about free speech”.
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