The social network Parler, which was forced offline after the January 6 attack on the American Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump, says it is being launched again.
The Twitter alternative has been struggling to return online since Amazon stripped it of web hosting services on Jan. 11 because it was unwilling to remove messages that incite violence. Google and Apple removed Parler’s app from their online stores for the same reason.
Parler said in an email on Monday that it would be led by an interim chief executive, Mark Meckler of the Tea Party Patriots movement. It is said that the service will be offered online to current users again this week, and that new users can sign up next week – and that they are not dependent on ‘Big Tech’.
However, the homepage of the website was a single, static page whose headline reminded viewers of ‘technical issues’. Although it was possible to log in via another variant of the URL, Parler’s iPhone app did not work, resulting in a “network error” when an Associated Press reporter tried it. Among the new posters was Fox News personality Sean Hannity.
According to the guidelines available on the site on February 14, Parler will use technology and human review to remove “threatening or provocative content”. They said a ‘community jury’ led by an Parler employee would hear appeals.
Parler was hosted by a Los Angeles cloud services company, SkySilk. Ron Guilmette, an Internet researcher and activist in California, said SkySilk appears to be a small outfit and that it is not clear to him whether it can provide adequate security for the site. In particular, Guilmette cited the need for robust defense against denial of service attacks, flooding a website with data traffic to make it inaccessible. Such attacks are a threat to any major website – especially if their content is controversial.
SkySilk did not respond to questions about the level of support the company offers.
CEO Kevin Matossian said in a statement that the company “does not advocate or condone hatred, but advocates for the right to private judgment and rejects the role of judge, jury and executioner. Unfortunately, it seems to many of our fellow technology providers differ in their views on this subject. ”
Mattossian added that his company applauds Parler’s new community guidelines.
After Amazon dropped it, Parler received a denial of service protection from a Russian outfit called DDoS-Guard. It ended after revelations that DDoS-Guard provided services to shady operations, including online forums popular with credit card thieves.
In a lawsuit that sought to force Amazon to restore its service, Parler’s management claimed that Amazon was aiming to deny Trump a platform on any major social media service. ‘This follows Twitter’s decision to permanently ban the former president from office and similar indefinite bans by Facebook and Instagram.
Parler’s former chief executive, John Matze, says he was fired on January 29 by the Parler council, which is controlled by conservative donor Rebekah Mercer. At the time, Matze told The New York Times that he had told Mercer that Parler should consider preventing domestic terrorists, white supremacists and supporters of QAnon, an unfounded conspiracy theory, from launching on the platform.
The 2 1/2-year-old social media site claims 20 million users. Trump never set up an account there, although Buzzfeed reported that he was considering buying a stake in Parler while he was president.