Conservative social media app Parler planning to relaunch ahead of 2024 election

Parler, one of the Trump-era social media apps that featured little content moderation and became popular among conservatives, has been sold again and is planning for a relaunch early next year ahead of the 2024 presidential election, its new owners said Monday.

The app, known for its use by participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, will re-enter a social media landscape increasingly crowded by platforms catering to conservative users — including one, Truth Social, that’s closely aligned with former President Donald Trump. X, the app formerly known as Twitter, has also become a hub for right-wing discussion since tech billionaire Elon Musk bought it last year and changed its name.

Ryan Rhodes, Parler’s new CEO, said he expected the app to be back online by Jan. 1 with a full relaunch by February. Parler has been offline since April.

“Our mission is clear: to provide a secure and inclusive environment for open dialogue,” Rhodes said in a statement. “While not aiming to compete with Truth Social, our monitoring measures are dedicated to keeping harmful content like terrorism, child porn, and trafficking off our platform.”

Elise Pierotti, a former Parler executive, said in a phone interview that Parler now has three co-owners: herself, Rhodes and Jaco Booyens, an anti-sex trafficking activist. She said they bought the app on Dec. 15 for an undisclosed sum from Starboard, a digital media company that had purchased Parler in April. She said she’ll return as chief marketing officer with Booyens as chief strategy officer, and that Parler would be based in Plano, Texas.

Starboard and its CEO Ryan Coyne did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday.

The rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, tried to buy Parler last year. He is not involved in the new ownership group but would be welcome as a Parler user, Pierotti said.

Founded in 2018, Parler was a reaction to the rules against hate speech, disinformation and other objectionable content on established social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Parler offered a Twitter-like feed of posts but with something different: looser rules around what people could say, including allowing false claims about the 2020 presidential election being stolen.

Republican politicians such as Texas Sen. Ted Cruz joined the app, but it had difficulty breaking through to mainstream popularity or even staying online in a tech industry dominated by giants. Amazon dropped Parler as a cloud-computing customer, and it battled Apple and Google for access to their app stores.

Pierotti said the new Parler would have its own servers in the U.S., eliminating the need to rely on Amazon Web Services or similar vendors.

“Internally, we have all of that, so we’re not at the behest of other companies,” she said.

Parler was among the apps used to plan the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of Trump — leading to bans from several internet hosting services, including Apple’s app store.

Pierotti said she’s confident the revamped Parler would be available in the Apple and Google app stores, saying that the two tech giants had set a precedent by allowing Musk’s X app in their stores despite that app’s loose speech rules. X even allows pro-Nazi content.

“As long as X is able to get in the app store the way they’re running, I don’t see any reason we wouldn’t be able to,” Pierotti said.

Pierotti said she and the other new co-owners weren’t ready to publish Parler’s new speech rules. She said the rules would follow the First Amendment’s wide leeway for objectionable speech, including hate speech.

“I’m one of the people who believe that hate speech is different for different people. I’m not an arbiter of truth,” she said.

But she added that the app intended to limit some forms of bullying and harassment.

“We want to have a space, a platform that’s comfortable to everyone,” she said. “Everyone will have moderation tools, so they can design their own experience.”