Parler comes back online

Parler, the social media network adopted by the hard right in the USA, is back online.

This comes a month after it was booted offline by Google, Apple, and Amazon in the wake of The Capitol riots that took place in Washington earlier this year.

The company made the announcement in a press release that its site is now back online and that users will be able to login to their accounts. The site is only taking new sign-ups from next week. According to The Verge, current users will find that their past conversations and posts are now gone.

In same release, Parler also announced that it has installed an interim CEO, replacing former CEO John Matze who announced that he’d been fired by the board at the beginning of the month.

New Boss. Same As The Old Boss?

The new interim CEO, Mark Meckler, looks like he won’t really ring in a sea-change on Parler, which has styled itself as a platform that values ‘free speech’. Meckler, for his part, is one of the co-founders of the right-wing group Tea Party Patriots. The company says, however, it is “conducting a thorough search for a permanent CEO.”

Parler gained an awful lot of users late last year after the 2020 elections, attracting a massive conservative base, who had turned away from platforms like Twitter and Facebook due to Parler’s loose set of terms and conditions about what content can be posted on it.

Parler was taken offline by its old host AWS and delisted by Google and Apple for failing to better police the content being posted on the site.