It has been a very difficult week for the social networking app Parler with bans from the Play and App Store. As reported by The Verge the company’s own lawyers have started to abandon the company as well.
This follows the violence in the Capitol last week which saw Donald Trump lose his Twitter account. Facebook also responded with harsh measure against the President. This all follows a mass anti-misinformation campaign from social media platforms during the election.
Parler comes into this for not following the trend of mainstream social media platforms and taking actions to stop the spread of misinformation. The app has been constantly criticised for allowing extremist content and damaging conspiracy theories on the platform.
Following the attacks on the Capitol, Apple demanded that the app establish new moderation policies. However, Google has gone one step further and enforced Play Store bans and Parler due to its lack of action as reported by Android Police.
Parler facing major problems after Capitol violence
It has also been reported by BuzzFeed, that Amazon will cut Parler off from its cloud hosting service. This means that unless the app can find another hosting service it will go offline this Sunday.
Parler is favoured by extremists and conspiracy theorists precisely for its lack of moderation and regulation. This means the platform is full of content that you would never find on the likes of Facebook and Twitter.
The social media platform has grown in popularity over the last year. This has come as other platforms have stumped up their moderation efforts pushing some users to other apps. However, this has all come to a head with Amazon and other deciding to pull the plug on the platform.
Parler CEO has responded to the issues with a slightly different take on the situation. He has described the various bans as “a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the market”. He claims Parler was “too successful too fast”.
To further add to Parler’s woes it seems that even its own lawyers have begun to jump from the sinking ship. Parler CEO John Matze has said that all their vendors and lawyers ditched the company on the same day as the bans.
Matze has said that the company is having trouble finding a new vendor to host the application. He believes that without the approval of Apple and Google vendors are unlikely to engage with app.
Overall, it looks like Parler’s commitment to total free speech regardless of the damage it caused could have ended their life as an application. Matze believes the company will build back from scratch but right now that looks increasingly difficult. This is due to the fact that most major companies will refuse to engage with Parler.