Social Media ‘Censorship’ Drives Thousands in Area to Parler App

Even some nationally syndicated talk show hosts have referenced it in recent weeks, including Mark Levin, Joe Pags, and others.

Following the election last Tuesday, the new social media app Parler has exploded to the  #1 download in Google Play, the App Store and other stores; surpassing even Tik Tok.

The relentless stream of censorship by Facebook, and especially Twitter (with the New York Post for example) has driven hundreds of thousands (if not a few million) conservative voices and groups to Parler in the last week.

Congress is being pressured to do away with Section 230, which grants 'immunity' to social media platforms for their treatment of content as well as what is posted on their sites. This has allowed them to be virtually immune from lawsuits and complaints. During the 2020 election cycle, even mainstream media has been reporting on the censorship by the two social media giants.

This last week, Facebook completely deleted the pro-Trump group "Stop The Steal" which grew to 350,000 members in 24 hours after election day Nov. 3. Facebook claimed it was worried about alleged calls for violence from some members of the group.

Launched in 2018, Parler is a social media communications app that is a cross between Facebook and a few elements of Twitter. It's more bare bones than Facebook, but allows users to 'echo' or share posts with or without a comment. That aspect appears to have been borrowed from Twitter, but without the endless mess of hashtags.

One of the chief investors in Parler is nationally syndicated media commentator Dan Bongino (a frequent sub on the Mark Levin Show) who is all over Fox News. Parler bills itself as a place where "the air is free and you can speak your mind", as conservative filmmaker  Dinesh D’Souza said.

D'Souza reports he has more than doubled his followers on Parler, from 500K to 1.2 million. Parler CEO John Matze said in July his platform had 1.5 million daily active users, online data shows a total of 2.8 million members at that time.

By contrast, Facebook claims they have 196 million daily active users, Twitter 187 million.

However Parler's downloads have exploded to the point where over the weekend, the site experienced some slowdowns due to the volume of signups and posting. We don't know how many downloads of Parler took place since November 3.  However, we do know Tik Tok had 2.31 million on Google Play in the 3rd quarter of 2020 (3 months). That works out to about 192K a week. Assuming those levels continued, and Parler BEAT Tik Tok last week, safe to say Parler was pushing towards 200K.

That's just some rough figuring from Google, similar figures for the App Store were not available as of this writing.

Three prominent Tri-City area social media political groups have also embraced the app. These groups have a total of about 7,000 Facebook members. According to their most updated information, their downloads of Parler are fast approaching their total Facebook numbers.

In addition to calls for getting rid of Section 230, national conservative commentator and activist Candace Owens has filed a lawsuit against the specific group of 'fact checkers' directly utilized by Facebook. This announcement also led to another small 'spike' in Parler downloads.

Only time will tell if this new social media-communication app gets to a point where it challenges the 'big two,' but it's definitely off to a fast start, and exploding in political and conservative circles.

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