43 Facts About Parler

Parler is an American alt-tech microblogging and social networking service associated with Donald Trump supporters, conservatives, conspiracy theorists, and far-right extremists.

Some left-wing and liberal users have been banned from Parler for challenging the prevailing viewpoints on the site, criticizing Parler, or creating parody accounts.

Parler's userbase grew exponentially during 2020 with minimal content moderation.

Parler called the removals "a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the marketplace".

Parler's name was taken from the French word, meaning "to speak".

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Parler launched in August 2018, billing itself as an unbiased and free speech alternative to larger social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook.

Reuters wrote that Parler had "mostly been a home for supporters of U S President Donald Trump" until June 2019.

Matze told the news organization that although he had originally intended Parler to be bipartisan, he had focused its marketing efforts toward conservatives as they began to join the service.

The influx of new accounts to Parler caused some service interruptions, making the site at times unusable.

Parler described the Saudi accounts as part of "the nationalist movement of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia", and encouraged other users to welcome them to the service.

Mentions of "civil war" on Parler increased fourfold in the hours just prior to the storming.

Activists, including Sleeping Giants, and employees of technology companies that had been providing services to Parler began to pressure those companies, which included Google, Apple, and Amazon, to deny service to Parler.

Parler experienced a wave of downloads after Twitter permanently suspended President Donald Trump from their platform due to his remarks about the storming of the Capitol.

Apple requested Parler submit a "moderation improvement plan" within 24 hours or face removal from the App Store.

On Parler, Matze posted that Parler would not "cave to pressure", and accused Apple of being anti-competitive.

Ahead of the shutdown, some Parler users issued calls for violence and armed protests at state capitols and circulated conspiracy theories about Apple.

Cloud communications company Twilio ended service to Parler, which made the service's two-factor authentication system stop working; Okta denied them access to their identity management service, resulting in Parler losing access to some of their software tools.

Parler went offline when Amazon withdrew its cloud computing services as scheduled.

Parler denied Amazon's claims that it failed to properly moderate content.

The Journal noted that Parler could consider using smaller cloud hosting companies, but that some technologists doubted such companies' ability to provide stable hosting to such a heavily used service.

Parler's web hosting provider was unknown, but it was noted that they were receiving protection from distributed denial-of-service attacks from the Russian-owned cloud services company DDoS-Guard.

Parler has a significant user base of Trump supporters, conservatives, conspiracy theorists, and right-wing extremists.

The Anti-Defamation League wrote in November 2020 that "Parler has attracted a range of right-wing extremists" including Proud Boys; proponents of the QAnon conspiracy theory; anti-government extremists including members of the Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, and other militia groups; and white supremacists including members of the alt-right and far-right accelerationists such as the terrorist group Atomwaffen Division.

Parler was used by at least 14 UK Conservative Party Members of Parliament; several ministers including cabinet minister Michael Gove and a number of prominent UK conservative commentators joined the app.

Researchers, journalists, and Parler users have observed the lack of ideological diversity on the service, and that Parler has served as an echo chamber for right-wing extremists and Trump supporters.

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In mid-2020, alt-right activist and Trump supporter Jack Posobiec compared the service to a Trump rally, saying Parler lacks the "energy" Twitter draws from having communities of people with differing viewpoints.

Around the same time, extremism researcher and professor Amarnath Amarasingam said of Parler, "talking to yourself in the dark corners of the internet is actually not that satisfying, " and that he was skeptical Parler would excite the far right without left-leaning users with whom they can interact and fight.

Parler is one of a number of alternative social network platforms, including Gab and BitChute, that are popular with people banned from mainstream networks such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, and Instagram.

Parler is known for its far-right and alt-right, antisemitic, anti-feminist, and Islamophobic content.

Parler has said they will not fact-check posts on the platform, a decision BBC News says has allowed misinformation to spread more easily on the platform than on mainstream social networks.

The Verge noted in November 2020 that Parler had become a "central hub" for the Stop the Steal conspiracy theory relating to the 2020 U S presidential election.

Study co-written by Annalise Baines, Muhammad Ittefaq and Mauryne Abwao published in the journal Vaccines found that Parler provided an echo chamber for vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories.

Parler describes itself as a free speech platform, and its founders have proclaimed that the service engages in minimal moderation and will not fact-check posts.

Parler says their moderation policy is based on the positions of the United States Federal Communications Commission and Supreme Court, although Gizmodo has described this as "nonsensical", noting that the FCC moderates only public airwaves, not internet content, and that some of Parler's rules are more restrictive than restrictions imposed by either the FCC or the Supreme Court.

In June and July 2020, Parler banned a spate of left-wing accounts, including parody accounts and accounts that were critical of Parler or the prevailing viewpoints on the service.

Mic wrote that Parler had used the personal information provided during signup to ban those they had identified as "teenage leftists"; Will Duffield of the Cato Institute wrote that Matze had apparently instituted a blanket ban on antifa supporters.

In January 2021, The Wall Street Journal reported that Parler had increased its moderation team to 600 people, and began paying them.

In January 2021, Parler executives acknowledged that rules-violating content had remained on the platform, which they attributed to their volunteer team of moderators being overwhelmed by large backlogs of posts to review.

Parler executives reported there had been an increase in calls for violence on the platform leading up to the riots at the Capitol.

Parler is a microblogging service that is both a website and an app.

Parler was founded in 2018 by John Matze and Jared Thomson.

Parler has not disclosed the identities of its owners; however, Dan Bongino publicly announced in June 2020 that he had purchased an "ownership stake" of unspecified value.

In September 2022, Parler announced $16M in Series B funding, for a total of $56M in funding to date.