EXCLUSIVE John Matze, CEO of Parler, is confident that his social media platform will be back online soon after his team was able to launch a static website and retrieve the company’s data over the weekend in a series of positive developments.
“I am confident that we will be able to make contact again by the end of the month,” Matze told Fox News in a telephone interview on Sunday night.
John Matze, CEO of Parler, is confident that his social media platform will be online again in the near future after his team was able to launch a static website and retrieve the company’s data over the weekend.
Parler registered his domain with host website Epik last week, following Amazon Web Services’ decision to shut down Parler due to failure to moderate “serious content” regarding the January 6 riot of Capitol. The move was a small yet important step that helped Matze realize that his aggressive time frame for Parler’s eventual return was realistic.
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“Every day it changes wildly, but I now feel confident,” Matze said. “We’re making significant progress. If you go to Parler.com, it does not fall into disrepair, it hits a server and it returns only one piece of information.”
Parler has been down since Amazon Web Services cut it off, but now fans of the popular social media platform can at least hear from Matze himself.
“Hey is this thing on?” Matze wrote in the first update when the static page was assigned. “Now seems like the right time to remind you all – lovers as well as haters – why we started this platform. We believe that privacy is paramount and that freedom of speech is essential, especially on social media. We aim has always been to provide a non-party public square where individuals can enjoy and exercise their rights to both.We will solve any challenge before us and plan to welcome you all back soon.We will not allow the civil discourse does not perish! “
Matze mentions that he can place the message ‘a big milestone’, despite the fact that it is a simple static website, as the ability to inform the public first hand is crucial for a business that is criticized by critics constantly attacked.
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“We’re going to post periodic updates there,” Matze said. “We’re going to try to get an update every day … so people can stay up to date on the site.”
Parler is suing Amazon for its decision to break the ties, claiming the move was “motivated by political animus” and is a breach of contract and an antitrust violation. Amazon had nothing to do with Parler, as Matze’s team set up the page independently.
However, Matze did manage to recover Parler’s data on Amazon on Friday, an important step to finally start again – and another important step in the right direction.
“Now we can actually rebuild Parler,” Matze said. “This is critical.”
Matze explained that recent headlines indicating that Parler could ‘never’ return what emerged last week were the result of a lengthy Reuters interview when the then frustrated CEO replied: ‘It can never be … we do not know yet, when he was asked time frame for the return of the platform. While Matze did suggest that the site could be done forever, he says it was merely a pessimistic moment with which the mainstream media teamed up.
The progress has changed Matze’s tone over the past 72 hours.
The CEO of Parler was upbeat and positive on Sunday and wanted to explain that his staff members are standing by him during the chaos of the past two weeks.
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“Despite all this, we did not leave even one employee,” Matze said. “No one, even if they were harassed and threatened, no one stopped … we have such a strong team, it just made them believe in us more.”
While a non-partisan company, Parler has become a haven for supporters of President Trump and others, who have either been kicked off Facebook and Twitter or the social networks are in protest. Now that Trump has been removed from Twitter and Parler is under a harsh spotlight, Matze hopes to keep Parler’s sellers anonymous so they do not come under fire from the liberal activists who want to silence the social media platform.
Fox News’ Lucan Manfredi contributed to this report.