Parler is back and wants no involvement with Big Tech

Shortly after the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump, the social network site Parler was forced offline after Amazon stripped it of web-hosting service on Jan. 11 after the site refused to remove posts inciting violence.

Google and Apple removed Parler from their app stores for the same reason. For the longest time, the site’s homepage has been a page with letting users know about ongoing “technical difficulties.” Parler’s iPhone app also ceased working, producing a “networking error” when tried .

New guidelines accessible on the site, dated Feb. 14, now state how Parler will make use of technology and human review to remove “threatening or inciting content.” A “community jury” headed by Parler employees will hear appeals.

Parler is hosted by a Los Angeles cloud services company SkySilk. Its CEO, Kevin Matossian, said in a statement that the company “does 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.” Mattossian added that his company supports Parler’s new community guidelines.

In a lawsuit attempting to pressure Amazon to restore the app back online, Parler’s management had claimed that Amazon sought to deny Trump “a platform on any large social-media service.” That followed Twitter’s decision to permanently ban the former president from its service and similar indefinite bans by Facebook and Instagram.

Parler’s previous CEO, John Matze, was fired on Jan. 29 by the Parler board, which is led by conservative donor Rebekah Mercer (the co-founder of the app). Matze previously told The New York Times that he’d told Mercer that Parler needed to "consider preventing domestic terrorists, white supremacists and followers of QAnon, a baseless conspiracy theory, from posting on the platform."