Parler, the "free speech" alternative to Twitter, keeps banning people
Last week, Sen. Ted Cruz encouraged his conservative followers to help “end the Silicon Valley censorship” by joining him on Parler, a “non-biased free speech driven entity” that really “gets what free speech is all about.” Parler began banning people almost immediately.
“If you can say it on the street of New York, you can say it on Parler,” CEO John Matze told CNBC last week, just days before declaring that you can’t repeatedly say “fuck you” to people or threaten to kill them, two things that happen daily on the streets of New York City. Other stuff that can get you banned: Pornography, obscene usernames like “CumDumpster,” and “pictures of your fecal matter.”
While this is all fine—it’s his site, he can ban whatever he wants—it undoubtedly undercuts the site’s reputation as a “free speech alternative to Twitter,” especially since Twitter allows much of what Parler doesn’t. (Matze says Parler’s regulations are in line with “Supreme Court precedents, the FCC, and the First Amendment,” a claim our colleagues at Gizmodo call “nonsensical.”)
It’s unclear which of these rules Devin Nunes’ Cow—a parody account that pretends to be a cow owned by Rep. Devin Nunes—broke in order to get banned. “Considering Nunes sued Twitter for bias against him, I assume he’ll now speak out against Parler too?” asked TechDirt’s Mike Masnick on Twitter.
Matze’s rules, at least in part, seem to be in response to a handful of noted Twitter pranksters who adopted the names of prominent conservative voices as their handles, then pulled a bait-and-switch on gullible Parler users.
Stefan Heck of the Go Off Kings and Blocked Party podcast, for example, built a following pretending to be Parscale before changing his name to MrEatsHumanPoop and sharing poop-related content with many followers. (He’s also guilty of Parler’s “no ‘fuck you’ replies” rule.)