The Lords of Big Tech, a group that has in recent years become somewhat of the digital paramilitary arm of the US Democrat Party, are no friends of either the US First Amendment nor of freedom of speech in general. These Big Tech oligarchs have decided that not they are not just content with censoring dissident voices on their own platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram etc, but are also going after and trying to shut down the free speech oriented alternatives to their own now heavily censored platforms.
I awoke this morning to the news that Amazon is going to shut down access to their hosting servers to the Parler platform. As of midnight tonight in the USA, Amazon Web Servers will no longer host Parler. In effect Parler is getting similar treatment to what Big Tech gave the Gab platform a few years back. Parler is being deplatformed not because they’ve done anything that could objectively be said to be wrong, but because Parler has become a home for all those who have been removed from the Big Tech platforms because they expressed views that run counter to the views of the Left or ask awkward questions of the political classes or challenge mainstream media narratives.
This is what the CEO of Parler, John Matze said four hours ago at the time of writing:
It’s likely that Parler will be down for at least a few days and maybe even a week whilst Parler organises new hosting and support services. They may even, as Gab did, have to build their own infrastructure. Parler had already been banned from the app stores of both Apple and Android in an effort to silence this platform just as Gab had been so banned.
As well as being political in nature I believe that this banning of Parler is also connected to the Big Tech platforms wanting to squash any potential competition. As Twitter starts to die because of censorship, Parler has increased its user base because of its support for freedom of speech, which is something that must bother those parts of Twitter management that have an eye on the bottom line.
Keep going back to the Parler site in order to see when it is back up and running and install it to your mobile device via their website and don’t bother with the app stores which have become somewhat of a censorship riddled walled garden. This isn’t an ideal solution for most non-technically minded smartphone users, it takes a little more effort than just clicking on an app store button, but it will be a useful and necessary stopgap until linux-based phones become more popular, as I believe that they will during 2021 and beyond.
