Parler has been having a difficult time getting back online. Now, CEO John Matze is admitting that it’s possible that it’s not coming back.
It’s growing increasingly difficult to be a right wing extremist these days. They commit one act of terrorism and its as if actions have consequences or something unfair like that.
Parler, of course, is considered to be a general online rallying point for those plotting right wing terrorist activities. Earlier, Apple and Google banned the Parler app from their respective app stores. At the time, Amazon was considering similar action if Parler didn’t take steps to actively remove content that incites violence. Parler apparently didn’t take sufficient action and Amazon pulled the plug on Parler. Specifically, Parler used the Amazon Web Services (AWS). When those services were pulled, Parler had a difficult time trying to stay online. All this as part of a purge by several web companies to rid themselves of connections to right wing terrorism and extremism.
Now, we are learning that John Matze is admitting that Parler may not even be coming back. From Reuters:
As a procession of business vendors severed ties with the two-year-old site following the storming of the U.S. Capitol last week, Matze said in an interview with Reuters on Wednesday that he does not know when or if it will return.
“It could be never,” he said. “We don’t know yet.”
After this story was published, Matze added: “I am an optimist. It may take days, it may take weeks but Parler will return and when we do we will be stronger.”
Matze said that Parler was talking to more than one cloud computing service but refused to disclose names, citing the likelihood of harassment for the companies involved. He said the best thing would be if Parler could get back on Amazon.com Inc.
The news comes as Peter Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay, criticized Parler for their lack of ability to stay online. He called their inability to keep the site online “embarrassing”. From Vice:
As one of the original co-founders of The Pirate Bay, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi knows a little something about keeping controversial services online. Kolmisoppi and his colleagues spent decades battling a global coalition of corporations, governments, and law enforcement agencies intent on wiping the file sharing website from the face of the internet. Unsuccessfully.
Kolmisoppi took to Twitter this week to share some thoughts on Parler’s recent deplatforming for failing to seriously police death threats and illegal content before and after the fatal Capitol riots.
“The Pirate Bay, the most censored website in the world, started by kids, run by people with problems with alcohol, drugs and money, still is up after almost two decades,” Kolmisoppi said. “Parlor and gab etc have all the money around but no skills or mindset. Embarrassing.”
“The most ironic thing is that The Pirate Bay’s enemies include not just the US government but also many European and the Russian one,” he said. “Compared to gab/parlor which is supported by the current president of the US and probably liked by the Russian one too.”
As noted previously, security has been stepped up at various locations with members of the national guard being present. Pictures showed various military personnel sleeping on marble floors between shifts. Some members of the public were surprised by that kind of accommodations. In response, one pizza shop supplied the troops with pizza. From Today.com:
It’s hard to go wrong with pizza, which is what a few members of Congress opted for as a way to show their appreciation for the National Guard stationed at the Capitol ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration next week.
We the Pizza originally got a call from Representatives Michael Waltz and Vicky Hartzler on Tuesday asking for them to deliver 150 pies to the troops at the Capitol Visitor Center.
“We wanted to help, so we matched (the order),” Micheline Mendelsohn, the deputy CEO for the company that owns We the Pizza, said. “Then we realized we weren’t even sending nearly enough so we just started donating to troops.”
Mendelsohn said they doubled that order and have been doing so ever since. So far, they’ve served about 700 pies to the troops at the Capitol and are preparing to send another 300 on Friday. They’re planning on sending about 300 a day until next week.
While that may have helped make that one of the best assignments ever, authorities are now asking members of the public to stop giving the troops free pizza.
Questions have been swirling over why the security response allowed the insurrectionists to gain so much access to Capitol Hill. Recently, the FBI spoke out, saying that it issued warnings that potential violence was going to happen ahead of time. From The Daily Beast:
The assistant director of the FBI’s Washington Field Office defended the agency at a Tuesday afternoon press conference, saying the office warned local law enforcement that individuals “with intentions to cause violence” were traveling to D.C. before thousands of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol.
In the weeks prior to the Jan. 6 siege, federal authorities worked internally with every field office in the nation “to ensure that we were looking for any intelligence that may have developed about potential violence,” Assistant Director Steven D’Antuono said.
During their search, the FBI “developed some intelligence a number of individuals were planning to travel to the D.C. area” to cause chaos—and alerted local authorities.
“We have to separate the aspirational from the intentional and determine which of the individuals saying despicable things on the internet are just practicing keyboard bravado or they actually have the intent to do harm,” D’Antuno said.
“As offensive as a statement can be, the FBI cannot open an investigation without a threat of violence or alleged criminal activity. In this case, we had no information anything was linked to a specific person,” he added.
Meanwhile, there is finger pointing going on as to who was to blame for such a small security presence. From NBC:
City officials here said it was the Pentagon that planned to keep the presence of National Guard troops at Wednesday’s pro-Trump rally small, unarmed and distant from the Capitol. But Pentagon officials said they were merely responding to the city’s wishes to “keep things de-escalated.”
A timeline released by the Pentagon late Friday says Capitol Police twice declined help from the Defense Department in the days prior to Jan. 6. But it also shows that when the city officials and the Capitol Police requested additional National Guard troops after rioters breached the Capitol, it took four hours for those troops to arrive.
Confusion and finger-pointing continued between local and federal law enforcement agencies in the wake of Wednesday’s siege of the Capitol building by a pro-Trump mob, which has now resulted in five deaths, including one Capitol Police officer.
A spokesperson for Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office said it was the Army secretary, not the city, responsible for the key decisions in the National Guard’s response, including their delay in mobilizing when violence escalated.
Meanwhile, some American’s are currently on edge. This is because there is fear that the right wing insurrectionists might be plotting further terrorist attacks in the next few weeks. The earliest date that we are aware of is the 17th which is this Sunday. From Slate:
After the November election, amid Donald Trump’s rising rhetoric about a “stolen” vote, I talked to counterextremism experts about what it would take to bring the president’s most devoted and deluded supporters back from the edge. John Horgan, a Georgia State University professor and the director of the Violent Extremism Research Group, told me at the time that violence had become inescapable. “The warning signs are all around us,” he said then. “I want to be wrong about this, but I see short- and medium-term violence in our future. It’s all around us.”
Horgan was closely following the chatter among right-wing groups leading up to the Jan. 6 Capitol assault. I called him back this week to ask if the attack was the kind of violence he had expected, what those images of rioters inside will mean for pro-Trump extremist groups, and what we can do to lower the temperature. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
There are fliers already being shared on right-wing chatter websites like Gab organizing for more “rallies” on Jan. 17 and on Inauguration Day. Do you think those are credible threats? What do you expect to happen?
I didn’t live in the United States when 9/11 happened, but I certainly don’t remember feeling like this before. I mean, it’s a deeply concerning time. There is an almost certainty of political violence between now and Jan. 20. These problems have been years in the making, and we just have a perfect storm of lots of different things happening at the same time. Twitter’s deplatforming of Trump in my view is four years too late, but at the same time a necessary drastic step. That will undoubtedly have some effect in terms of taking the steam out of these times.
The question at this stage is whether all this will amount to something. In two days, we’ll find out just how credible these threats are. At any rate, we are watching a country on edge over radical extremists. For a lot of people, we can only hope that the threats are overblown and nothing significant will become of this. After January 6th, who knows though?
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
