It’s like a bad dream for Parler fans. It’s Déjà vu all over again. The site is down, again. This time it’s been taken down by its new owner. In its place, they put up a press release reading in part: “No reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone just for conservatives is a viable business any more. By refocusing on the cloud and IT infrastructure space George Farmer has done an exceptional job at successfully leading Parlement into a critically important industry where it has already begun to excel.”

Parler was acquired by Starboard, a media conglomerate taking its name from the right side of a ship. The move came suddenly, as far as I can tell, without notice. Starboard states they are about providing uncancelable platforms, yet they took down one of the very few.

Another part of the press release reads: “Advancements in AI technology, along with the existing code base and other new features, provide an opportunity for Starboard to begin servicing unsupported online communities – building a home for them away from the ad-hoc regulatory hand of platforms that hate them.”

This sounds good, but somehow is not reassuring. Is such a service necessary? Probably. Is this the way to reassure the Parler user they’ll have a home, away from the madness that is the Twitterverse? Probably not. There’s nothing in the statement to reassure the Parler users to stick around, because what comes will be better than ever. How many times will Parler users have the rug yanked out from under them before they jump ship for Truth Social, Getter, or a kinder, gentler Twitter? I don’t know what sort of company Starboard is, and I want to give them the benefit of the doubt, but the ham-handed way they just took down Parler is not a good start.

What do you think?

Also going on… Will the arrest of an Air National Guard airman for espionage provide a pretext for reviving the RESTRICT Act? How could a 20 y/o airman in an entry-level position have access to the highly classified information he is alleged to have disseminated over the internet? We were led to believe the information he had released had been altered. Was the classified information that was released online disinformation, or was or government telling it was inaccurate the real disinformation? Will this incident be used as a pretext to revive the ailing RESTRICT Act, some have called, “Patriot Act 2.0”?

Until next time,

Stay healthy, happy, and free!

-JP Mac