By Jared Holt
Right-wing commentators and media personalities are again threatening to abandon Twitter in favor of Parler, an alternative social media platform where they say they won’t be persecuted for holding conservative beliefs. Nearly identical calls for a Twitter exodus echoed through right-wing social media circles last year, but the transition failed to take hold at any major scale.
The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign was weighing alternatives to traditional social media platforms after Twitter and Facebook took moderation actions against posts from the president and his campaign. Facebook last week removed Trump campaign ads that contained red inverted triangles—a symbol used by Nazis to designate political prisoners in concentration camps—citing site policies against organized hate. Twitter has recently added warning labels and fact-checking links to Trump tweets that contain misinformation or content that violates Twitter community guidelines.
The Journal reported that the recent moderation action has “top campaign officials considering alternatives, such as moving to another, lesser known company, building their own platform or doubling down on efforts to move supporters to the campaign’s smartphone app, according to people familiar with the discussions.” One possibility reportedly floated by Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale is a Twitter alternative called Parler.
The social platform Parler, launched in 2018, bills itself as an alternative to Twitter, closely resembling the all-but-defunct app Gab, which was quickly overrun with extremists and conspiracy theorists shortly after its inception. Like Gab, Parler has become home to its own pockets of far-right extremists who enjoy the platform’s loose content moderation policies. Although Parler claims to be nonideological, it exists currently as a bastion of almost exclusively pro-Trump, right-wing content. Trump’s campaign teased nearly identical considerations to the press this time last year, but a shift to Parler never materialized in any major sense.
The Daily Beast reported last year that Parler and Gab were locked in a heated standoff over which platform Trump would post on first, although as it stands Trump has yet to give up Twitter—where he is able to shape national news with 280 characters a tweet at a time and reach more than 82 million followers. No reporting since then has indicated serious plans for Trump to join either platform soon.
But with Parler in the news, Trump’s leading online sycophants are once again vowing to abandon Twitter once and for all.
Rep. Devin Nunes of California has joined the chorus of voices promoting Parler after news broke that he had unsuccessfully waged a lawsuit against an anonymous Twitter user running a parody account pretending to be Nunes’ fictional cow. Unfortunately for Nunes, the pseudonymous cow has followed him to Parler.
Originally published by Right Wing Watch, 06.25.2020, a project of People for the American Way, a program of Open Society Foundations, under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license.