For a brief moment, it seemed like Kanye West was about to become the new owner of Parler, a conservative based social media platform that was actively courting the rapper while he was palling around with white nationalist Nick Fuentes. The move would’ve been bad news for Donald Trump’s other conservative platform, Truth Social, which was already having enough problems that will come into play here in a second.
Ultimately, the Kanye deal never happened, which left Parler up for grabs. It’s since been acquired by Starboard, a Virginia-based digital media company who announced on Friday that it’s already shutting down the platform because, as Trump and now Elon Musk are learning, trying to make conservative-only platforms is a huge waste of time and money.
“No reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone just for conservatives is a viable business any more,” Starboard said in a brutal statement. As for what will happen to Parler’s users, they will apparently be ported over to the company’s existing platforms that service actually censored communities? Your guess is as good as ours here.
Via Variety:
Instead of continuing to offer Parler as a consumer-facing social service, Starboard said it would leverage Parler’s assets across its existing businesses as well as provide information-technology services to customers in “marginalized or even outright censored communities – even extending beyond domestic politics.” Starboard said the Parler acquisition gives it an opportunity to “begin servicing unsupported online communities – building a home for them away from the ad-hoc regulatory hand of platforms that hate them.”
Gonna be real, we have no idea what any of that means. We just think it’s hilarious that the new owners of Parler said that trying to make a conservative Twitter is a dumb and terrible way to run a business. That was pretty fun.
(Via Variety)