John Matze, the boss of the conservative social network Parler, banned from the Internet since mid-January, announced that he had been dismissed from his post by his board of directors in a message to his employees, published Wednesday, February 3, by the American chain Fox Business.
“On January 29, the board of directors of Parler, controlled by Rebekah Mercer, decided to terminate my role as managing director of Parler”Mr. Matze said in this memo. “I did not take part in this decision”, he added.
In the aftermath of the January 6 riots on Capitol Hill in Washington, stormed by supporters of former President Donald Trump, Parler was wiped off the web by major tech companies.
Apple and Google have removed the app from their download platforms, arguing that the network had let numerous messages of incitement to violence run without real moderation. Amazon then banned Parler from its servers, which is tantamount to disconnecting it.
“For the past few months, I have fought, despite constant resistance, for my vision of the product and my deep belief in freedom of expression”, wrote Mr. Matze in his letter. “I worked for endless hours and tried by all means to restore Parler, but at this point the future of Parler is no longer in my hands”, he continued.
Asked by the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Matze said his disagreements with investors focused on the strategy to follow to allow the application to return to Google and Apple online stores. The two Web giants could accept Talking again, provided that the social network sets up moderation tools. Mr. Matze says he was working on setting up automatic moderation tools, and wanted to ban all groups classified as domestic terrorist organizations – including some neo-Nazi groups that were present on Parler – on the platform.
These two points seem to have been viewed by shareholders as unacceptable compromises. Pro-Trump influencer Dan Bongino, shareholder of Parler, told the Wall Street Journal than “Talking could have been back in a week if we had agreed to kneel down”, but that the choice had been made to fight against the big platforms.
Parler did not react to a request from Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Links with Russia
The network had grown in popularity since Facebook and other major platforms cracked down on extremist groups calling for violence. A US federal judge on January 21 rejected a request from Parler which would have forced Amazon to host it again on its servers.
Carolyn Maloney, the chairman of the House of Representatives Control Committee, has also asked the FBI to investigate the role played by the network in the invasion of the Capitol. In his letter, Mme Maloney also asked the FBI director to examine the company’s accounts and its ties to Russia.
Parler is in particular in business with the Russian company DDoS-Guard, according to a statement addressed to AFP by the latter. The Russian group, however, did not specify the nature of these services.
The conservative social network has stopped working since Amazon’s intervention, but it is partially “Reappeared thanks to Russian hosting services”, underlined the press release of the commission in January.
