There were a few alternatives
to the big social media platforms
like Facebook and Twitter,
but none of them had really ever taken off
in the way that Parler did.
In the days since the election,
many are flocking to a new social media app called Parler.
We're now looking at about 8 million users,
which is a pretty significant jump
for a platform that's only been around for about two years.
Parler is the number one free app
in the country, even above TikTok.
In the age of Facebook and Twitter,
starting a new social media network isn't easy.
As political rhetoric began heating up online
leading up to the 2020 presidential elections,
so did the amount of users
that felt they were being censored
for expressing their opinions.
My viewpoints are clearly being suppressed.
You can't tell me they're not.
These censorship operatives
are only focused on the right making sure we're not here.
Personalities like Michael Lindell or Donald Trump
whose tweets and messages have gotten them de-platformed
are going off to start their own self-style,
free speech social networks.
It's gonna be all the influencers.
It's gonna bring back our free speech.
In reality,
sustaining an online media platform
isn't as simple as having the idea.
Apple has banned the fast-growing Parler app.
Parler is a case study in how
just having a basic technological stack
and the motivation to go and build and market something
is one of the smaller parts
of actually operating a social networking service.
Parler was founded by
a man named John Matze
who started the company with one of his college classmates.
A week ago, you said,
"John, you should come back on the show
once you guys had 8 million users,"
and I'm sorry, we waited too long.
He worked in the family office of Robert Mercer,
as, kind of, their IT administrator.
Robert Mercer,
who formerly round one of the world's
most successful hedge funds,
has been a political mega-donor over the last decade,
and was the funding behind the far right Breitbart news.
So, he was able to get money from Rebekah Mercer,
Robert Mercer's daughter,
who is a well-known conservative mega-donor
who ran an influential PAC for Donald Trump
in the 2016 presidential campaign.
A new app called Parler
has become a hit with conservatives
who called the social media platform
a refuge for free speech.
The company was founded in 2018
and brands itself as a, quote, unbiased social media.
Well, I think people are waking up
and looking at what's going on
on these other social platforms,
and they're seeing how everything's so curated
and how they're being manipulated,
and they just wanna go somewhere
where they're not going to be controlled.
Parler started back in 2018
as a alternative to Twitter,
also taking some ideas from Reddit
and other social media platforms,
and it was intended to be
a less heavily-moderated version of Twitter, essentially,
catering towards people that were
potentially de-platformed
on Twitter or similar platforms.
An alternative social network
might sound good in theory,
but they're notoriously expensive to keep up and running.
While the initial investment by the Mercers
helped Parler get started,
it needed to grow a big enough user base
to attract advertiser dollars.
Social networks make money primarily through advertising.
They have your attention, you're scrolling through the feed,
and so, they'll put messages
from brands or advertisers in the feed
to subsidize the fact
that most of these services are free.
They know your name, your age, your gender,
usually, where you live.
Oftentimes, they might know what websites you've visited,
what products you looked at.
So, for example,
if you're scrolling through your feed
and you see a pair of shoes
that you were just looking at online, you know,
that is a form of re-targeted advertising.
They know you thought about those shoes,
and now the advertiser wants
to put them back in front of you
in hopes that you'll buy them.
This is why it's historically been difficult
for smaller social networks
with limited audiences to make money.
The fewer eyes for advertisers to target,
the less value there is
for brands to spend their advertising dollars.
When you look at big social networks,
the amount of money that it takes to operate those services
is immense, right?
Because you have employees,
you have engineers who are building that,
you have lawyers who are dealing with objectionable content
or copyright issues,
you have marketing people who are promoting these products.
Yet, despite these challenges,
Parler was actually able to build and grow
a steady user base.
Our business model is going to be an ad revenue model.
It'll be specific around influencers,
so advertisers will target the influencers
and those people with a large reach,
rather than us as a whole platform.
There were various spikes
in user growth over time,
but it really didn't get a ton of traction
until 2020, during the elections,
when other social networks
started doing more labeling of content, more fact checking.
Do you notice how anything the left says,
is any of it ever blue flag like that?
A lot of the user base was put off by that.
They perceived it as, you know, partisan.
Anybody here been censored on social media?
A lot of hands.
The site really kind of exploded
when a lot of conservative influencers
and elected officials started using
and pretty aggressively promoting the site.
This platform gets what free speech is all about.
Can we now move everybody from Twitter to Parler?
There were only a few hundred thousand users,
and, over time, you know,
before it was initially de-platformed,
that rose to around 13 million or so users.
That's more than three times
the number of users that Gab,
a previously lightly moderated platform,
had registered, despite launching two years earlier in 2016.
Though Parler did attract record numbers of users
compared to apps like it in the past,
it was still running with fairly limited resources.
I think, for most of their existence,
they had a very small development team
with not a lot of experience,
and that worked fine with smaller amounts of users.
They had multiple times
when they had to deal with outages
as user interest was starting to spike.
It had some privacy compromises
where more user data was getting distributed
than should have been,
the most prominent being that
it wasn't scrubbing metadata
from any of the videos or photos that were being uploaded.
Unlike Twitter, you have to supply your driver's license,
a photo of yourself.
Those are optional additional steps,
so that's called a real world verification.
This would prove costly for Parler,
and security researchers were eventually able
to scrub the site for 70 terabytes of user data,
meaning those driver's license photos
that users uploaded to gain verification
were potentially of risk.
And although Parler bills itself as a free speech platform,
there are still limits as to what you can share online.
So, in the United States,
you can post a lot of stuff on the internet,
but there's some stuff that you legally cannot,
and so, what that means is
you can't truly run a platform
in the way that Parler describes.
You have to have some moderation.
So, the information we have
regarding how Parler was doing moderation
is mostly based around
what some folks found within the application.
It was a quite basic system.
They said that they were hiring paid moderators,
but this was mostly just something that people did
as they felt like it.
Content moderation is expensive,
and Parler never did scale up a moderation team
that could keep up with the surge of users
after the 2020 presidential elections,
making it a breeding ground for mis and disinformation.
That misinformation would eventually lead
to the January 6th attack on the US Capitol
where the attacks were being glorified on Parler
in real time.
It wasn't so much that January 6th
was organized on Parler,
but it was more that Parler, by its own fault,
happened to be the most valuable repository
of January sixth evidence, immediately after the sixth.
That inadvertently became key evidence
against its own users.
They have photos and videos that were uploaded to Parler
have been, kind of, key evidence
in identifying the people who were there
and also used in the prosecution.
They had pressure from their hosting provider,
from Amazon,
specifically calling out particular pieces of content
that were active on the site, not being moderated.
Amazon gave them an ultimatum
to essentially clean up their content
or get off the platform.
The celebrations on Parler
of the January sixth insurrection in Washington
ultimately prompted Amazon, Google, and Apple
to cut the app from their service.
But now big tech is cracking down,
including Apple, which removed Parler from its app store,
saying that posts on Parler
related to the riot on Capitol Hill
included calls for violence, which violates store rules.
They also had other service providers
who did their phone number authentication.
They had that suddenly pulled out from under them,
which caused some issues with their authentication systems
and anti-spam systems.
Content moderation is a really tricky beast,
quite frankly, because, on the one hand,
it is expensive, it takes a combination of technology,
but also human beings to review things
because a lot of this is nuanced or intricate,
and so, you know, you talk about someone like Facebook
who gets really crushed for their inability
to properly moderate their service.
They're still spending billions of dollars every year
on this effort, and they're struggling and or failing
in a lot of cases,
and if you're a new business,
you're probably not gonna be able to afford that.
Parler CEO John Matze said he was fired last Friday
by the company's board.
In a statement, he said, over the past few months,
he's met constant resistance to his product vision.
According to John Matze,
he was fired by Rebekah Mercer
in the aftermath of January 6th.
He said that they didn't agree
with his vision for the product,
and that he had proposed
that they do more about hate speech and do more moderation.
And now, you know, very dramatically, honestly,
is suing Rebekah Mercer
and suing the entire board of directors at Parler.
It's ongoing litigation.
Parler, Mercer, and Matze
didn't respond to several requests for comment.
Parler and Mercer have previously denied
the allegations it Matze's complaint,
which is pending in Nevada state court.
Matze was fired due to his own poor decision-making,
lack of loyalty to the company,
and general lack of fitness to serve as Parler CEO,
Parler said in court filings.
After Matze was ousted on January 29th,
Parler announced a new interim CEO,
Mark Meckler, in February.
Under him, the app agreed to tone down some of its content
in order to be accepted back on Apple's app store.
So, the site is back up and running.
We're welcoming back our 21 million users.
But by the time Parler
came back online in mid February,
users had long moved on.
Mostly what we see
with a lot of these alternative platforms
is that there are maybe one or two discrete spikes
of user creation,
but their growth does tend to flatten out over time
as people kind of lose interest
and aren't getting the same dynamics they want
from a social networking site.
Parler isn't the first self-style
free-speech social media platform on the scene,
and it certainly isn't the last.
In October, 2021, former President Trump
who had been permanently banned
from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram,
and a number of other social media sites
in the aftermath of the January sixth insurrection
announced that he would be launching his own social network
called Truth Social.
We heard from former President Trump yesterday
that he is starting his own media platform.
What's your take on this?
Will this work?
The biggest difference with Truth
and President Trump's effort to build a social network
is simply that it's being started by someone
who already has a massive following and massive influence.
The challenge will be, how do you maintain that?
What we know about President Trump
is that he likes to make sure his message is everywhere.
He would always post on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube,
but he wanted things to be widespread.
What is the motivation or the incentive
for me to sign up for that network
if I can get his message in other places?
But as we've also seen with past attempts
of these types of niche social networks,
history tends to repeat itself.
I think what everyone who tries to launch
their own alternative social media platform quickly realizes
is that making an alternative social media platform
is actually really hard.
Parler is kind of this perfect example
of the arc that many of these sites will take.
They'll kind of launch with some bare bones infrastructure,
they'll get some kind of artificial
boosting and support, right?
But, you know, it doesn't actually mean
that people really like using the site.
In recent years,
there's been calls for social media to be more regulated,
as their effects on society become clearer.
One of the things that makes a Facebook
or a Twitter so dangerous is that
their scale is so big
and the ability to spread stuff is so easy,
that bad stuff can basically spread
before the company has a chance to react.
A few years ago, there was the Christ Church shooting,
and there was a video posted on Facebook
and the company said,
"Hey, we removed something like 90%
of the videos automatically, right away."
Well, that means 10% still, you know, existed,
at least for some time, on the network.
They're just so big that
even a small percentage that gets through
can impact millions and millions of people.
What, if anything, are companies doing
to stop the dissemination of hatred?
And so, something that feels radical
might not actually make huge waves on a site like Parler,
but might have a lot more impact
on something like Facebook,
simply because of the audience it's reaching.
And increased government regulation
could mean that smaller, niche social networks
may have an even harder time staying afloat.
Right now, what we're seeing is
companies like Facebook
are kind of starting to push for regulation
because they know that they will be able to comply with it
and other sites will have more difficulty,
and so, it actually gives them a bit of a market advantage.
In a way, Parler's, you know, lack of success,
especially right after January sixth,
when the App Store and the Google Play Store
and Amazon kicked them off,
in a weird way, that failure by Parler
may have been success for the overall
kind of movement toward, you know,
feeling that big tech is too powerful,
is overstepping its boundaries,
because this gave a lot of fuel to that fire,
and a lot of people who were already worried
about big tech's power
suddenly had another very prominent,
very public example to point to
when it came to, you know, in their mind, overstepping.