In what should have, frankly, been the greatest day in its entire two-year existence—the day it could have scored the biggest banned fish of them all, Dingle J. Tantrumtweets himself—things are suddenly looking grim for Parler. See, the “Twitter for people too violent, racist, or otherwise insane for Twitter, Christ that’s grim” service has been coming under some scrutiny of late—on account of the whole “people using it to plan armed revolt against the U.S. government” thing—and now finds itself having been deplatformed by Google’s Android storefront, with threats from Apple to do the same.
And while Parler will still be available from desktops and browsers, this is, obviously, a problem for a platform that exists largely to translate right-wingers’ floating toilet anger into new content for itself. Apple, at least, is giving the service 24 hours to present a “moderation plan” to deal with the fact that it’s become a haven for (which is to say, exists primarily to service) Qanon fanatics, militia members, right-wing extremists, and everyone else who wants to live in a reality sans irritating things like “fact-checking” or “rules about saying you want to murder somebody.” The only issue there being that Parler is explicitly based on not having any such moderation efforts; its entire ethos revolves around not “censoring” its users when they tell blatant lies, or espouse racist conspiracy theories, or—again—use the service to coordinate efforts to storm the U.S. capitol and impose a regime of shirtless idiot fascism on America. Honestly, it’s hard to blame Google for skipping this particular step and just kicking the app off the Google Play store already.
Somewhat hilariously, this news comes as Parler appears to be having some fairly serious network issues anyway—presumably on account of its users logging on en masse to await the arrival of Donald Trump, who finally got his dumpy ass kicked off Twitter earlier this afternoon, as part of what appears to be a wave of big tech companies suddenly discovering their consciences a scant half-decade or so later than would have actually have been useful or safe.