PrairiePundit

 PJ Media: In the days after the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, Big Tech moved against a conservative alternative social media platform, Parler, based on the premise that the rioters has used Parler to plan the attack on the Capitol and that Parler had failed in its responsibility to prevent such coordination. Based on this narrative,  Apple and Google  removed Parler from their app stores and  Amazon removed  Parler’s internet hosting. Yet on Thursday, Parler flipped the narrative on its head. On Thursday, Parler  sent a response  to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform’s request for documents regarding the riot, the company explained in a press release. In that response, Parler revealed that it had “proactively developed an open line of communication with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the fall of 2020 and referred violent content and incitement from Parler’s platform over 50 times before January 6th. Parler also...

 I have finally been able to access my Parler account and find it more interesting than it was before it was killed by a Big Tech collusion attack.  Trump should give it a try.

 William Jacobson: Despite the attempts of the cabal of Amazon Web Services, Google, Apple, and many other high tech monsters to take it down, Parler has been brought back to life. It’s unclear if Parler is completely back, but I just logged in and the Legal Insurrection page is up and running and we still have almost 400,000 followers. Our prior “parleys” have not populated yet, but I assume that will take time. The prior Parler App on my iPhone still doesn’t work. If it holds, this will be one of the great — perhaps the first great — victory over the Big Tech oligopolies who control so much of our lives. Parler was falsely blamed as being the hub on which the Capitol Hill Riot was planned, but examination of DOJ indictments shows that Facebook and to a lesser extent Twitter were the central hubs — yet no one shut them down. Fuzzy covered the findings in Parler Vindicated: Study Finds Facebook ‘Far and Away’ Most Used Social Media By Capitol Hill Rioters. Parler was shut down bec...

They are also blocking the people who are trying to calm the anger. Speech suppression does not block anger, it increases it.  It can lead to looking for more violence to express the anger.  We should be doing an investigation of the alleged vote fraud to get the facts out and not attacking the people who believe the election was rigged.  We need a commission made up of officials from states that had a smooth election to examine what happened in the states that had serious issues in getting their count.

 Charlie Martin: ... The given reason, of course, was people were saying violent things on Parler and all the  biens pissants  are, of course, shocked,  shocked  that this was “permitted.”   It might be different if the double standard weren’t so glaring. As Amazon was canceling Parler’s hosting — in apparent violation of their contract — they were  selling “Kill All Republicans” tee-shirts , and it turns out that while Twitter and Facebook were canceling Parler, the  actual mob was coordinating on Twitter and Facebook . Last year, before the election,  Twitter and Facebook suppressed a mainstream newspaper for publishing the Hunter Biden story , as well as suspending hundreds of individuals’ accounts. Twitter  eventually said it was a mistake weeks later  and restored the  New York Post  account, and after the election, we found that the “Russian disinformation” story was a lie. But the damage was done and the story that ...

 Epoch Times: Google and Facebook executives were placed on the defense this week as they were questioned on the role their platforms played in the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol . Protesters who stormed the Capitol used Google-owned YouTube and Facebook, among other platforms, before and during the storming. Pressed on whether Alphabet, Google’s parent company, missed the extent of the danger, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said this week that the company had been worried about “the possibility of real world harm” and “incitement of violence.” “I don’t want to say we clearly anticipated what happened last week, but the potential for violence was something concerning. There had been intelligence leading up to it,” Pichai said during the Reuters NEXT conference. ... YouTube removed thousands of videos for promoting theories of “widespread fraud” in the weeks after the 2020 election and, following the Capitol breach, suspended President Donald Trump , accusing him of “inc...

 Post Millennial: "Of the first 13 people arrested by the FBI in connection with the event at the Capitol, a total of zero were active users of Parler. The overwhelming amount of planning for that event, the overwhelming amount of advocacy for people to go there and to breach the Capitol was done on Facebook, and on YouTube, and on Twitter," Greenwald asserted. "This is one of the ironies is that Google is one of the monopolies that wants to police our discourse and control our thinking and rule our politics that kicked Parler off of its app at the exactly the time that Parler had gone to number one," he continued. "Google said, we will not allow you on our service," Greenwald said, when "the reality is the service that Google owns, YouTube, played a much greater role." ... Greenwald noted in his article that "liberals celebrated this use of Silicon Valley monopoly power to shut down Parler, just as they overwhelmingly cheered the prior two ...

 Epoch Times: Parler filed a response to Amazon Web Services on Wednesday in its lawsuit against the Seattle-based retail giant, arguing that a representative with Amazon didn’t care about the content moderation, but was only concerned with allegedly silencing President Donald Trump. It came after Amazon Web Services (AWS) said in court that the company displayed an “unwillingness and inability” to remove violent content after the firm suspended Parler from its web-hosting services on Monday morning. “In completely shutting down Parler’s ability to retain its millions of users, attract advertisers, or generate any revenue, AWS has knowingly inflicted lasting damage to what was, until very recently, a thriving business,” Parler’s filing late on Wednesday read (pdf) . The document cited text messages between an AWS representative and Matze. Amazon “expressed no concerns with Parler’s content moderation,” according to the filing, adding that the same Amazon “representative repeatedly...

 Washington Examiner: A handful of Big Tech companies moved to take down social media platform Parler over the weekend, but it appears to have found a new company to help try to keep its website running. On Monday, Parler registered its domain and server to be hosted by Epik, an internet webhosting company known for working with right-leaning websites. Gab, another social media platform popular with conservatives, also uses Epik. A web domain search  shows  that Parler is now registered with Epik. Epik put out a statement on Monday claiming it had no discussion of providing future services to Parler. Epik did acknowledge, however, that Parler was "working on satisfying the requested terms placed upon them." Epik also  defended  Parler and said that it was being unfairly treated in comparison to its larger competitors Twitter and Facebook, which create an "undeniable double standard" when it comes to their policing and enforcement of content. ... I suspect Parler...

 Epoch Times: Shares of Twitter on Monday dropped 12 percent, after the company banned President Donald Trump and a slew of other conservatives. Shares dropped after the market opened on Monday, reaching a low of $45.17. Twitter shares closed at $51.48 on Jan. 8. Twitter said it removed Trump’s account on Friday because some of his recent posts were glorifying violence. The company echoed critics who attempted to connect Trump’s rhetoric with the breach of the U.S. Capitol. Trump responded by accusing Twitter of coordinating “with the Democrats and the Radical Left in removing my account from their platform, to silence me—and YOU, the 75,000,000 great patriots who voted for me.” Twitter also banned prominent users including lawyer Sidney Powell and Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Other users who weren’t banned left the platform, including radio hosts Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh. ... Trump had a significant number of followers on Twitter.  Many of t...

 Fox News: Although "tech tyrants Google , Apple and Amazon wiped Parler out, the service will return" soon, Fox News contributor Dan Bongino said on Monday. Parler went down early Monday following Amazon Web Services' decision to suspend it from its cloud hosting service after Wednesday's U.S. Capitol riot. CEO John Matze told " Sunday Morning Futures " that the site will try to "get back online as quickly as possible," after writing on the platform that the site may be unavailable for up to a week. Google announced Friday that it would suspend social media platform Parler’s listing from its Play Store due to a failure to moderate "egregious content" posted by users related to the violent siege on Capitol Hill this week. A spokesperson for Google confirmed in a statement to Fox News that its "longstanding policies" require that apps with user-generated content have measures in place to remove certain obscene content – incl...

 Shipwreckedcrew: ... Today the Democrats have probably the weakest incoming President in … maybe forever (Jimmy Carter?), the Senate is evenly divided 50-50, and the Democrats just lost 10 seats in the House while winning the Presidency, with the GOP House candidates running 3% better in the popular vote than they did in 2018. And this is the party that the Big Tech companies think will protect them WHEN the GOP regains power in Washington??? It would be easy to fall back on the idea that Big Tech, through political contributions, has “purchased” enough support from some in the GOP that when combined with Democrat support they will be able to head off any legislative or regulatory challenges. I believe that calculation can no longer be relied upon. Big Tech has not just taken up the political views of Democrats, Big Tech has now used its market dominance in social media in a move to silence political opposition from a large segment of the GOP needed by GOP legislators to get elec...

 Epoch Times: A top Republican in the House of Representatives on Sunday called for a racketeering probe into large technology companies who over the weekend took action against Parler, a social media website. “This is clearly a violation of antitrust, civil rights, the RICO statute. There should be a racketeering investigation on all the people that coordinated this attack on not only a company but on all of those like us, like me, like you, Maria,” Rep.  Devin Nunes  (R-Calif.), the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, told Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures” host Maria Bartiromo. After Twitter banned President Donald Trump and some other users, Parler saw its traffic explode. Soon, though, Google announced it had removed Parler from its online store, a move followed by Apple. Then, Amazon  announced  it was suspending Parler from its web hosting services. Parler CEO John Matze  told The Epoch Times  his company is prepared to take leg...

  Mobile Apps Daily: A Descriptive List Of Alternative App Stores For 2021 After immense research, we have compiled a collection of the best alternative app stores for Android and iOS for app publishers to consider - don't miss out on the complete list! There are several alternatives listed at the link above.   The efforts of several tech giants to suppress the Parler site is unprecedented.  I suspect there will be significant litigation and there may be regulatory consequences for those trying to suppress Parler.

 NY Post Editorial: So Twitter has “permanently banned” President Donald Trump’s account. While this will please Democrats, and perhaps lessen the (justifiable) heat the company is taking from regulators, it just proves again that Twitter’s claims that it is “just a platform” are hogwash. Some of Trump’s tweets were untrue and incendiary, but so are the Ayatollah Khamenei’s. His account is still up. The difference is Twitter is run by American liberals, who only really police one type of person, of one political persuasion. It’s a little ridiculous that what finally did Trump in was tweeting that he wouldn’t be attending Joe Biden’s inauguration . Twitter twisted that to mean that he still won’t accept the results of the election — which just shows they were looking for an excuse. Rather than let the readers judge, they pulled the plug. This paper has a bit of history with Twitter’s bias, seeing as they shut us down over a true Hunter Biden story . That incident proved that they ...

Megan Fox: Censorship: Twitter Claims Trump Tweet About Upholding the Law Is 'Abusive' and Boosts Competitor Parler So to Twitter enforcing the law is abusive?   How do people this unintelligent get such positions in any company? BTW, I tried Parler and after jumping through a few hoops was able to get it to work.  It has an attractive format and a lot of good conservative contributors.  I will probably spend more time with it.