Parler speaks no more as America’s Trump-supporting users cross the line again

Amazon Web Services has withdrawn its hosting of the right-wing Twitter alternative to the ire of conservatives, who voiced angry criticisms of the move on… Twitter. James Moore reports

Amazon Web Services has withdrawn from hosting Parler, a right-wing Twitter alternative, citing violent content (AFP via Getty)

Parler is no longer parlaying anything. The favourite social network of the hard right has gone dark after Amazon Web Services withdrew its hosting.

Founder and CEO John Matze, splitting his time between frantically trying to find an alternative to keep the business alive and doing media interviews, responded by alleging an attack on free speech. But is it?

Parler was a favourite of far right conservatives before President Donald Trump’s suspension from Twitter and Facebook in the wake of his incitement of the armed insurrection that took place in Washington DC last week. Indeed, it was used by the loose coalition of extremists that organised it.

But Trump’s banishment from his favourite platforms for his role in those appalling events turbocharged its  as his supporters sought alternatives to the reigning monarchs of social media.

There are a handful out there but Parler, basically a Twitter clone where people “parley” rather than tweet, was the clear winner, and became one of the fastest growing apps in the world.

The problem for Amazon is that what some of its users were parleying crossed the line.

BuzzFeed News obtained an email from the company citing a steady increase in violent content. This included death threats, glorification of violence, and posts urging “patriots” to march on Washington, weapons at the ready, the day before the inauguration of Joe Biden. 

The app had already been removed from Apple’s and Google’s stores, making life much more difficult for the business before Amazon moved. But the latter’s action was the knockout blow that turned out the lights.  

The backlash on the right was predictably swift and furious. The president’s rabble rousing son Donald Trump Jr, for example, fulminated: “It continues... Big tech has totally eliminated the notion of free speech in America.”

That quote came from, um, Twitter, where Don Jr remains a live presence. He has been using the platform to urge his 6.5m followers to sign up to his website (and to buy his books).

Other right-wing commentators have weighed in with similar sentiments using the same venue.

Mao and Lenin are, according to Don Jr, smiling at the allegedly Orwellian censorship carried out by Twitter and Facebook, a censorship that lets their critics take potshots at them on their own platforms. Well, I suppose the two tyrants might have had a chuckle at his hyperbole were they still alive. Meanwhile, their successors will probably be taking notes. No one does faux victimhood better than Don Jr.

Yet even the New York Times’ Tech columnist Kevin Roose baulked a bit in the wake of the way Parler has been squeezed. Ditto the American Civil Liberties Union. The former also said Twitter’s decision to ban President Trump served to highlight the incredible authority possessed by the likes of Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, something he said that no elected official on Earth could claim.

Kate Raine, the senior legislative counsel for the ACLU, said of the Trump ban: “We understand the desire to permanently suspend him now, but it should concern everyone when companies like Facebook and Twitter wield the unchecked power to remove people from platforms that have become indispensable for the speech of billions – especially when political realities make those decisions easier.

“President Trump can turn to his press team or Fox News to communicate with the public, but others – like the many Black, Brown, and LGBTQ activists who have been censored by social media companies – will not have that luxury.”

At this point, I think it’s worth paying attention to the points made by David Golumbia, associate professor of digital studies at Virginia Commonwealth University on Bloomberg. He said: “Freedom of speech is a cherished value primarily because it promotes democracy: Because governmental power is held by the people, the people must be able to freely exchange ideas without restraint and without fear of reprisal. Yet many of the same people – including the current president – who say their freedom of expression is inhibited by ‘censorship’ attack or undermine the foundations of democracy.”

Golumbia pointed out that it was not necessary to tolerate violent and ugly rhetoric to have a strong democracy in which the free exchange of ideas was alive and well, citing Germany’s prohibition of Nazi speech as an example.

“The idea that Nazi speech must be tolerated to have a functioning democracy is provably false. Nazi speech has been outlawed in Germany since World War II, and yet Germany continues to score very high, sometimes higher than the United States, in assessments of the world’s democracies,” he wrote.

The platforms operated by Dorsey and Zuckerberg have clearly-stated rules governing what people can and cannot post (as does AWS for the services it hosts), but the problem is that they haven’t been enforced with any degree of consistency, where they have been enforced at all. Trump senior was a persistent violator before his ban.

The material available on Parler prompted Amazon to act because it violated its rules. All of this, it should be noted, occurred after it became clear that the Democrats had won America’s free and fair election and Joe Biden was going to be sworn in, radically changing the political dynamic in Washington.

There is clearly an issue with the de facto monopoly, or rather the oligopoly, big tech possesses, for which read Facebook, Amazon, Google, Twitter, Apple and Amazon. This is an issue Roose raised when he cited the issue created by the closure of alternatives.

The ability of big tech to dictate terms and throw its weight around ought to be discussed, and yes, regulated.

But Parler is no martyr here. Nor is President Trump. Their conservative supporters only ever pick up the cudgels when the speech that’s being called into question is their own. Their silence when those not in their club have raised issues with social media’s wildly inconsistent moderation is deafening, their hypocrisy is rank.

It’s often said that you will get short shrift pleading free speech if you end up getting brought to book by yelling “fire” in the middle of a crowded theatre.

Trump, and his allies on Parler, have been doing far worse. They haven’t just been yelling fire. They have been lighting it and then throwing bricks at the audience when they try to escape it.

So yes, Parler’s host had to act, however belatedly, just as Trump’s social media hosts did. They didn’t have much of a choice.