Curtain. On Monday January 11, shortly after nine in the morning, Paris time, the Parler application completely stopped working. This self-proclaimed Twitter competitor, launched by ultra-right activists with the financial support of the billionaire Mercer family, close to Donald Trump, has had its servers cut by Amazon Web Service, one of the main hosting companies of sites and applications around the world.
Before Amazon, Google and Apple had already withdrawn the application from their Android and iOS stores, citing the same reasons: the almost total lack of moderation on Speaking and the calls for violence that could be found there emanating from supporters. more fervent Donald Trump, in the wake of the violence that occurred on January 6 at the Capitol in Washington.
Throughout the weekend, after the current President of the United States lost access to his personal Twitter account (@realdonaldtrump, one of the largest accounts in the world, with 88.2 million subscribers to the when it closed), the hardest fringe of Republican activists began looking for an alternative to Twitter, denouncing the censorship imposed by “Big Tech” – Amazon, Google, Apple, but also Facebook, Twitter, or even the Mozilla Foundation (Firefox).
Gab, first beneficiary of the closure of Parler
On Parler as on other networks, Internet users recommended going to Rumble (a low-moderated Canadian video service), Vkontakte (Russian competitor of Facebook), Odyssey (very low-moderation video platform) or Gab (competitor of Twitter popular with the far right). “A massive exodus is underway now, so be part of the trip, friends”, enthuses a message widely shared in pro-Trump groups on various social networks, including French speakers.
Gab seems to be the first beneficiary of the closure of Parler. Sunday, January 10, its CEO, Andrew Torba, was pleased to have welcomed 600,000 new users in twenty-four hours and to have recorded more registrations in the last two days than in the last two years. For the founder of the service, the closure of Parler and Donald Trump’s Twitter account is a “Digital holocaust of conservatives, Christians, and all those who dare to oppose the regime of the communist oligarchy”.
Unlike Parler, Gab does not use Amazon’s services for its hosting: the service has its own servers. At the end of 2020, the site had transferred all of its data to its own hosting center. Two years earlier, the social network, which presents itself as “The market leader when it comes to defending freedom of speech against the tyranny of Silicon Valley”, had itself been threatened with closure by its host, Microsoft Azure.
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