LR Podcast: Long Suffering Parler Users

It’s like a bad dream for Parler fans. It’s Déjà vu all over again. The site is down, again. This time it’s been taken down by its new owner. In its place, they put up a press release reading in part: “No reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone just for conservatives is a viable business any more. By refocusing on the cloud and IT infrastructure space George Farmer has done an exceptional job at successfully leading Parlement into a critically important industry where it has already begun to excel.”

Parler was acquired by Starboard, a media conglomerate taking its name from the right side of a ship. The move came suddenly, as far as I can tell, without notice. Starboard states they are about providing uncancelable platforms, yet they took down one of the very few.

Another part of the press release reads: “Advancements in AI technology, along with the existing code base and other new features, provide an opportunity for Starboard to begin servicing unsupported online communities – building a home for them away from the ad-hoc regulatory hand of platforms that hate them.”

This sounds good, but somehow is not reassuring. Is such a service necessary? Probably. Is this the way to reassure the Parler user they’ll have a home, away from the madness that is the Twitterverse? Probably not. There’s nothing in the statement to reassure the Parler users to stick around, because what comes will be better than ever. How many times will Parler users have the rug yanked out from under them before they jump ship for Truth Social, Getter, or a kinder, gentler Twitter? I don’t know what sort of company Starboard is, and I want to give them the benefit of the doubt, but the ham-handed way they just took down Parler is not a good start.

What do you think?