Parler is about to play again.
The app for the social media company “free speech” will be available again in Apple’s App Store. Apple reinstated Parler on April 14, according to a letter from Apple to Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Representative Ken Buck (R-Colo.), Released today. Once Parler releases an updated app, iOS users can download it again.
In the letter to Lee and Buck, Apple said its App Store review team talked to Parler for a long time about how to bring the app to company guidelines. “As a result of the talks, Parler has proposed updates for its app and the content moderation of the app,” wrote Timothy Powderly, Apple’s senior director of government affairs.
Parler was kicked out of both Apple and Google’s app stores following the January 6 uprising in the U.S. Capitol, which left five people dead and hundreds injured. Shortly thereafter, Amazon discontinued the hosting services for Parler. At the time, all three Big Tech businesses said the social media business had not done enough to moderate violence-inciting posts. Apple said in its letter that it still stands by its decision to ban the app in January, pointing out that it came to the decision independently of Google and Amazon.
Google is reportedly open to allowing Parler back into the Google Play Store. In a statement made to Android Police following Apple’s recovery of the Parler app, the company said: “Parler is welcome in the Play Store as soon as it submits an app that complies with our policies. “
Parler was initially launched in August 2018 and its founders claimed it would be a “non-biased, social media-free speech”, which the untrue narrative that conservative voices are censored on other social media platforms. It was founded by John Matze, Jared Thomson and Republican political donor Rebekah Mercer. While the latter two remain, Matze is fired in a brouhaha on January 30 over the implementation of content moderation in an effort to get Parler back in Apple and Google’s app stores.
Moderation over Parler was reportedly uncomfortable at best. Parler apparently warned the FBI about threats on the platform, but apparently did little to remove them before the uprising. The site’s rules prohibit users from posting threats and criminal activity, but there were proof of both. Unlike other social media platforms, there was limited automated moderation. Instead, the site relies heavily on part-time paid “jurors” pulled from a pool of Parler users. Superficially, Parler takes a Twitter approach to social media. Posts are limited to 1,000 characters, and users can upload images to share with others.
In the aftermath of the riot, a hacker scraped and released almost every message published on Parler, an archive of about 80 terabytes. The hack was relatively simple – Parler’s public API required no verification, and messages were increased numerically so that almost everyone who knew about it could easily access messages, images, and videos. The site also did not scrape location data from images or videos, as other social media platforms often do, so that everyone could quickly determine where the media was recorded.
These images, videos and location data were taken into account with investigations into the Capitol uprising. Users have left a digital trail of their activities in the Capitol building so law enforcement can identify and prosecute. One user of Parler, Eduard Florea, was investigated for placing threats against Senator Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) And eventually charged with illegal possession of ammunition.