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Parler Is Still Dead

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Of all the multiplying modes of online censorship displayed over the past four years, and especially over the past few months, two stand out: The deplatforming of a U.S. President by Twitter and Facebook, and the deplatforming of an entire platform, Parler, by Amazon Web Services.

Parler’s case illustrates the vacuous absurdity of the glib libertarian refrain “the free market will ensure free speech.” Content producers on YouTube are routinely deplatformed after finally becoming, after years of hard work, barely able to make a living. It is absurd to think these micro-players will just automatically rebuild their audiences and remonetize their work on some alternative platform. Even if they could rebuild their audience overnight, where can they go? YouTube controls 90 percent of the U.S. market. Ninety percent. Small producers aren’t going to build their own platform. And the alternative platforms they might migrate onto, all of them combined, only offer one-tenth as many viewers.

Yet Parler’s case is even harder. This company potentially has access to millions in additional financing, if not tens of millions, which they can invest in building a new platform that doesn’t depend on the global online hosting resources of Amazon. But with over ten million users and the potential to rapidly grow by at least one order of magnitude, only the biggest hosting services can accommodate Parler. That’s a small list, headed by Amazon, followed by Google Cloud, Alibaba, IBM, and Cloudflare. And barring a breakthrough that we would have heard about by now, none of them will do business with Parler.

Parler’s website has been reduced to a splash page, offering hopeful updates. The company’s initial expectation was they would be back up in a few weeks. That didn’t happen. Then, only a few days ago, co-owner Dan Bongino told Fox News that Parler would be back up by February 8. They’re not.

A Big Tech media mouthpiece, Fast Company, recently published an article that describes the technical challenges facing Parler. Quoting from the article:

“If Parler didn’t want to risk being dropped by another web host, it could alternatively set up its own in-house servers. That’s what the far-right social network Gab did after getting dropped by its hosting provider, Joyent, in 2018. After relying on a different host for the following two years, Gab announced last September that it had built its own infrastructure instead. But going that route is even more burdensome than relying on a smaller host. Again, Parler would have to work out all of the areas where its code expects to hook into Amazon Web Services in particular, and it would have to rebuild many of the tools that Amazon had provided as part of its service. On top of all that, Parler would have to pay for the actual servers, wait for them to arrive, and employ enough engineers to actually configure them.”

If technical challenges weren’t enough, there have also been management shakeups, with Parler’s CEO and co-founder John Matze terminated on January 30 by the company’s board of directors.

If Parler reappears anytime soon, it will be against all odds. Don’t hold your breath.

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Parler is Dead

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The destruction of Parler by Google, Apple, and Amazon is a harbinger for what is to come. The sad reality, moreover, is that the tech giants have still used only a fraction of their power. Manipulating search results, throttling up or down various Tweets or Facebook posts or YouTube videos, even deplatforming, was only the prelude. Now it has been shown that the tech companies are willing to deny hosting services.

As discussed in a useful article published by ZD Net, a website that covers technology business, there are only a handful of hosting and cloud providers that have the capacity to host large websites. Amazon is one of the biggest, and as Parler CEO John Matze has acknowledged, the other big hosting services are reluctant to defy Amazon and accept Parler’s business.

This should surprise nobody. It is not merely the management of tech companies that are determined to silence the American Right. The workforces of these companies are typically more activist than their bosses, and as well these companies are under pressure from powerful leftist nonprofits. Any major provider that accepts business from Parler will be targeted, and they know it. Why bother?

What this means should be clear to every other online property that caters to right-wing content creators. If you get too big, you will need serious technical support from very large service providers, and you are not going to get it. This means there is a ceiling on how much alternative platforms can grow. BitChute and Rumble, which are growing fast, could easily hit this wall.

Moreover, even if alternative platforms innovate with models such as Napster which essentially decentralized the servers onto millions of client machines, there are other ways that big tech can attack them. The ISPs can ban the transmission of specific URLs using automated algorithms. It is even possible that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) can create a blacklist of URLs, refusing to recognize them and preventing their ability to operate on the internet. And of course as we’ve already seen, every major financial institution from PayPal to Chase can cancel the accounts of individuals and businesses that traffic in right-wing content.

This week Big Tech served notice to the American Right: We are going to keep you on the run, we are going to limit your audiences, we are going to keep you small and we are going to watch everything you do. We are going to do everything in our power to prevent you from getting your message to millions of people.

Among the many tragic implications of this virtual lockdown is the fact that alternative media has become the only place to find balance. The American news media is awash in propaganda. It is sickening.

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Parler’s “Erasebook” Makes the Case Against Facebook

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Facebook is evil. So goes Parler’s new website, erasebook.info, which makes “The Case Against Facebook.” They even provide detailed instructions on how to download your entire Facebook history and then delete your Facebook account.

If you want a good summary of all the ways Facebook is manipulating our minds and monitoring our thoughts, this new website is a good place to start. Launched in August, erasebook has posts diving into topics such as Facebook’s decision to block posts defending Kyle Rittenhouse, or even searches for “Kyle Rittenhouse,” as well as links to fundraising campaigns for Rittenhouse.

A recent article on erasebook exposes how Facebook is deleting posts alleging leftist organizations started wildfires in Oregon, claiming they’re “conspiracy theories.” Other articles explain how Facebook makes deceptive claims about user privacy, allegedly uses your phone’s mic to record your conversations, and of course, shaping the 2020 election outcomes.

Erasebook offers compilations of the lawsuits against Facebook, an “evil list” of the “30 most dangerous tech companies,” reports on congressional anti-trust hearings against these “technoauthoritarians,” and much more.

Parler’s motivation for launching its erasebook campaign is obvious enough. They want to drive people off Facebook and onto Parler. They’re up against the massive advantage Facebook has in membership, nearly three billion vs just over three million. To compete with Facebook, they’ll also have to add – to name a just a few – groups, live chat, video, and better search functions.

But it is terrific to see a well organized and ongoing assault on one of the most powerful and problematic companies in the history of the world.

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