Kanye West is buying rightwing social network Parler for an undisclosed sum. From our story:
The purchase by the rapper, who legally changed his name to Ye last year, is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year.
“In a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves,” he said in a statement.
George Farmer, the chief executive of Parler’s parent company, Parlement Technologies, said: “This deal will change the world, and change the way the world thinks about free speech. Ye is making a groundbreaking move into the free speech media space and will never have to fear being removed from social media again.”
The purchase caps off an increasingly erratic couple of weeks for the star, which started at Paris fashion week at the beginning of the month. West and rightwing activist Candace Owens, who is also Black, appeared at Paris fashion week in matching “white lives matter” sweatshirts. After that, West was invited on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, where he attacked Trump’s Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner, for seeking personal profit in his involvement with the peace process in Israel. West was criticised for the antisemitic undertone of the attack, while in leaked footage, he shared even more explicitly racist conspiracy theories that Fox declined to broadcast.
He then turned to Instagram, sharing screenshots of a long conversation between himself and fellow star Sean Combs, better known as Puff Daddy, in which Combs pleaded with West to recant some of his statements. Instead, West accused his friend of being told what to do by Jewish people, for which his account on the service was suspended. So he went on Twitter, where he declared he would go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE”. His tweet was deleted and his account was suspended.
Luckily for West, Candace Owens got him into this mess, and she could get him out of it, too. Parler chief executive George Farmer, the wealthy heir of Brexiteer peer and former Conservative party treasurer Michael Farmer, happens to be her husband.
The “free-speech” social network Parler was founded by Rebekah Mercer and John Matze in 2018, the second major attempt at building a post-Twitter social network for the US right, after the launch of Gab in 2016, and it succeeded in building a moderately sized base of users with its promise of zero moderation. Unfortunately, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a moderately sized group of American right-wingers on a platform with zero moderation must be in want of an insurrection. In the aftermath of the January 6 invasion of the US Capitol, Parler was deplatformed by most major tech companies. Matze was chucked out, and Farmer brought in to replace him and rebuild the site in a more respectable image.
It isn’t hard to imagine the conversation unfolding, with Owens as a matchmaker. West has a problem: as he sees it, he’s been banned from major social networks because they’re afraid of him speaking the truth about the powerful Jewish lobby, and he needs somewhere to post that won’t censor him any further. Farmer has a problem: while he’s restored Parler to the iOS and Android app stores, and built a technical backend for the social network that can survive Amazon’s refusal to provide services, the social network is a shadow of its former self, with the Trump-backed Truth Social sucking the air out of the room, and the less ideologically affiliated Telegram offering effectively moderation-free social networking to anyone who wants it.
It’s the best exit Parler is going to get. Despite constant accusations of biased moderation on the part of mainstream social networks, the dream of a rightwing splinternet has repeatedly failed to pass.
That’s partially because the structural weight of content moderation runs deeper than the simple surface choices of social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. You can build a site that mimics their interfaces but offers no moderation, like Parler did, but you run into the same pressures one layer down the “stack”: Apple and Google are unwilling to allow the sort of content that true “unmoderated” apps inevitably end up hosting, from actionable calls for violence to nonconsensual sexual imagery and worse.
If you give up on apps altogether and exist purely as a website, building a high-traffic site that doesn’t rely on cloud services from Amazon, Google or Microsoft is tricky. Even if you pull it off, as KiwiFarms did, you can only succeed for as long as your obscurity stops the same pressures bearing down on the smaller companies who are unwittingly partnering with you.
If this all sounds familiar, it sort of should. It’s the same basic pressures we talked about last week, leading to the slow death of the porn-friendly internet. And the root cause of a lot of these changes are, well, the same pressure that we talked about the week before last, with a UK coroner finding that the “negative effects of online content” played a direct role in the death of teenager Molly Russell in 2017.
Just like last week’s topic about porn, there’s a weird exception to this, too: the messaging service Telegram operates a social network that is effectively an unmoderated Twitter. That platform has become the haven for many users exiled from Parler; to this day I keep tabs on Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson, on his Telegram account with almost 160,000 followers, long after he was removed from every major website.
But despite its far softer moderation practices, even Telegram can’t completely replace Twitter, Facebook or TikTok for a fully rightwing splinternet, because the site doesn’t have the one thing the movement needs: left-wingers.
The essence of political activism on a social network is somewhere between open warfare or a player-versus-player video game. Without political opponents, there’s a hollowness to these communities that means that the mass exoduses never quite occur. That isn’t to say their existence isn’t meaningful: an unmoderated space to congregate can be a powerful thing for any movement, particularly one at the radical end of the political spectrum. But, Kanye or not, Parler will always be a sideshow to the main event.
There is one last twist to the story: Elon Musk, who may end up owning Twitter before the month is out, and seemingly loves the idea of it being considered in the same breath as Parler and Truth Social. It would be a slow ship to turn, but what if the rightwing-friendly version of Twitter is … Twitter?
Giphy a C! Giphy an M! Giphy an A!
For anyone wondering about Britain’s position on the global stage given gestures vaguely towards Westminster, don’t worry: We’ve still got it, if “it” is “the regulatory power to kibosh multimillion dollar tech deals”. The CMA has forced Meta to give up on its dream of buying Giphy. From our story:
The Competition and Markets Authority told Meta in November that the only way to resolve competition concerns was to dispose of Giphy, the largest supplier of animated gifs to social networks such as Snapchat, TikTok and Twitter, which it acquired two years ago for $400m (£290m).
Meta appealed against the decision, which the regulator said would “protect millions of social media users” and stop Facebook “increasing its significant power in social media”, which was upheld by the Competition Appeal Tribunal on five of the six grounds challenged.
After the tribunal’s ruling in July, the CMA conducted an “expedited review” of its original ruling, which included new submissions from Giphy and Meta, and on Tuesday it said it stood by its order to sell the business.
Giphy’s appeal included the memorable argument that gifs are “cringe” and “for boomers”, and thus the company has no future unless it is taken under the wing of a stable parent.
The CMA didn’t buy it, arguing that it would “significantly reduce competition in two markets” – display advertising and social media – if the merger were to go ahead.
Meta will likely try and find a buyer for Giphy, since the company stands little chance of surviving on its own. Where it ends up will be interesting. My guess? A company in the content business: a Netflix or Disney would have the most use for a service that now exists solely as a platform for hosting shareable clips of commercial entertainment.
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