Parler Censporship

The right leaning Parler social media app has returned to the iOS App Store after months of negotiation with Apple, with a solution including censoring any content that offends Apple's morality.

Parler's interim CEO, Mark Meckler, said that the company has worked to address Apple's concerns without compromising our core mission. He said:

Anything allowed on the Parler network but not in the iOS app will remain accessible through our web-based and Android versions. This is a win-win for Parler, its users, and free speech.

Parler positions itself as a free speech-focused alternative to Twitter or other social media sites. The platform was banned by Apple, Google, and other web platforms after they all decided to censor Donald Trump.

Parler, the self-proclaimed free-speech platform taken offline after the riot at the U.S. Capitol last month, says it has relaunched.

Mark Meckler is serving as interim CEO of Parler after its previous top executive was fired by the social media platform.

Parler had been pulled from app stores run by Apple and Google and dropped by Amazon's web hosting services after the incident at the US Capitol. Parler was one of the platforms used by supporters of former President Donald Trump to coordinate and chronicle the event.

Parler is an alt-right version of Twitter that launched in 2020 with a free speech ethos. Parler's CEO spoke of high ideals at the tiime:

We're a community town square, an open town square, with no censorship... If you can say it on the street of New York, you can say it on Parler.

Maybe easier said than done though, it wasn't long before the wrong type of free speech somehow required censorship. Parler started deleting accounts of left-wing members and then it banned pornography (which Twitter allows). Eventually, it became more censorious than Twitter, with the exception of allowing the kind alt-right speech that is generally banned on mainstream social media.

However is seems that Parler has recognised the seeming hypocrisy and steered back towards free speech. It revised its terms of service to allow things that Twitter already allows, including pornography. As you might expect, Parler is now a bastion of right leaning speech and ads for hardcore pornography websites.

The Washington Post's reviewed Parler under its revised rules and found that searches for sexually explicit terms surfaced extensive troves of graphic content, including videos of sex acts that began playing automatically without any label or warning. Terms such as #porn, #naked and #sex each had hundreds or thousands of posts on Parler, many of them graphic. Some pornographic images and videos had been viewed tens of thousands of times on the platform.

Sounds promising!