Maria Bartiromo, the host at Fox Business, had given up on Twitter a couple of days before the election.
She made a particular tweet during the election that happened to claim that Democrats have been trying to fix the election results. Later, Twitter had hidden that post with a warning of misleading content. Following that complaint against Bartiromo accusing her of violating rules, Twitter took no official action against her account.
After that, she tweeted urging her 900,000 Twitter followers to leave the platform and join Parler.
Parler was founded in the year 2018 and promoted as a platform for free speech. Last Saturday, John Matze, co-founder and CEO said that one of the owners of Parler, Rebekah Mercer, and her father, Robert Mercer had provided support and financial aid to President Trump. They were the leading donors to the causes of conservationists.
Parler has very few restrictions regarding the kind of posts users make that appear more attractive than Twitter and Facebook, who have too many censorships.
Twitter and Facebook had made their censor restrictions more stringent weeks before the elections to prevent the spread of misinformation. Groups were terminated, warnings issued, and posts removed, in case any fraudulent claims were made.
In this regard, Parler edges ahead and has garnered a huge number of users, increasing exponentially.
Parler Soaring
Parler is recently one of the many highest downloaded apps on Android mobile phones. They have garnered approximately 10 million users, out of which 4.5 million had joined within the past week.
Jeffrey Wernick, head operating officer, stated that Parler’s popularity is due to the user-friendly nature of the app. Parler has strict privacy measures and very translucent regarding the data and content put up on its platform.
Nonetheless, it lags way behind Facebook’s 2 billion everyday users and Twitter’s 187 million.
In appearance and functioning, Parler is very similar to Twitter and its posts are called ‘Parleys’.
Free Speech Or Misinformation
The minimal amount of censorship and moderation of content often leads to widespread misinformation and false claims which were evident during the US election.
When Twitter started labeling the tweets of Trump as false claims, a huge number of Twitter users abandoned the app to join Parler. During this brief period, Parler saw a huge surge in the number of users.
Several notorious events have taken place on Parler which questions the credibility of the app.
Parler Lagging Behind
Despite the rapid growth of Parler, users seem unlikely to leave Twitter and Facebook.
Though most conservative are often seen tweeting that they will abandon Twitter or Facebook for constantly labeling their posts, they rarely ever leave.
Numerous officials are heard saying that the entire flurry around Parler is soon expected to die down as the entire election conflict becomes stable.
Also, most of the happening debates and news are instantly found on Twitter and Facebook rather than Parler.
