海角大神

Parler is relaunching. Can it succeed without Big Tech?

Parler is relaunching after Amazon ended its web-hosting agreement in January. The social media site brands itself as pro-free speech and anti-Big Tech censorship, but says it has a process to remove 鈥渢hreatening or inciting content.鈥�

First Look

The right-wing friendly social media network Parler, which was forced offline after supporters of then-President Donald Trump led聽the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, says it is relaunching.

The Twitter alternative has been struggling to return online since Amazon聽ended its web-hosting agreement on Jan. 11 over its unwillingness to remove posts inciting violence. Google and Apple removed Parler鈥檚 app from their online stores for the same reason.

Parler said in an emailed statement Monday that it would be led by an interim CEO, Mark Meckler of the Tea Party Patriots movement. It said the service would be brought back online for current users this week with new users being able to sign up next week 鈥� and would not be reliant on 鈥淏ig Tech.鈥�

The site鈥檚 homepage, however, was a single, static page whose lead post reminded viewers of 鈥渢echnical difficulties.鈥� While it was possible to log in via a different variation of that URL, Parler鈥檚 iPhone app did not work, yielding a 鈥渘etworking error鈥� when an Associated Press reporter tried it. Among new posters was Fox News personality Sean Hannity.

Guidelines accessible on the site,聽dated Sunday, said Parler would use technology and human review to remove 鈥渢hreatening or inciting content.鈥� They said a 鈥渃ommunity jury鈥� headed by a Parler employee would hear appeals.

Parler was being hosted by a Los Angeles cloud services company, SkySilk. Ron Guilmette, a California-based internet researcher and activist, said SkySilk appeared to be a small outfit and that it was not clear to him whether it could provide adequate security for the site. In particular, Mr. Guilmette cited the need for robust defense against denial-of-service attacks, which flood a site with data traffic to make it inaccessible. Such attacks are a threat to any major internet site 鈥� especially if their content is at all controversial.

SkySilk did not respond to questions about the level of support the company is providing.

Its CEO, Kevin Matossian, said in a statement that the company 鈥渄oes not advocate nor condone hate, rather it advocates the right to private judgment and rejects the role of being the judge, jury, and executioner. Unfortunately, too many of our fellow technology providers seem to differ in their position on this subject.鈥�

Mr. Mattossian added that his company applauded Parler鈥檚 new community guidelines.

For a time after Amazon dropped it, Parler received denial-of-service protection from a Russian-based outfit called DDoS-Guard. That ended following revelations that DDoS-Guard had provided services to shady operations, including online forums popular with credit card thieves.

In a lawsuit seeking to force Amazon to restore its service, Parler鈥檚 management claimed that Amazon aimed to deny Mr. Trump 鈥渁 platform on any large social-media service.鈥� That followed Twitter鈥檚 decision to permanently ban the former president from its service and similar indefinite bans by Facebook and Instagram.

Parler鈥檚 previous CEO, John Matze, says he was聽fired on Jan. 29聽by the Parler board, which is controlled by conservative donor Rebekah Mercer. At the time, Mr. Matze told The New York Times that he鈥檇 told Ms. Mercer that Parler needed to consider preventing domestic terrorists, white supremacists, and followers of QAnon 鈥� a baseless conspiracy theory 鈥� from posting on the platform.

The 2 1/2-year-old social media site claims 20 million users. Mr. Trump never established an account there, although Buzzfeed reported that he considered聽buying a stake in Parler聽while he was president.

This story was reported by The Associated Press.