Las Vegas City Wire

U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) remains defiant in his fight against what he sees as big tech censorship against conservatives. He suggested Henderson-based Parler as an alternative.

"As for the tech oligarchs, they control the delivery of this deranged content that they create that masquerades as news,” Nunes said during a recent speech at his Freedom Fest convention.  "Overcoming the stranglehold on the news and their brazen censorship of conservatives is the primary challenge facing us today. Understand that we don't have to be slaves to these corporations, be on the lookout for other alternatives, I know Parler got nuked, but right now this is streaming live all over the globe on Rumble.”

The number of complaints coming from Parler members convinced they were being targeted have multiplied, as posts using such terms as civil war, insurrection and rebellion soared along with mentions of the group Proud Boys, a far-right, neo-fascist, male-only extremist group. Parler data analysed by WIRED reveals that the mentions of such terms rose from just 858 instances on January 1 to 3,261 at their peak just over a week later, an increase of 280 percent.

“Most important, continue to have faith in the cause. The Democrats control Washington right now, they've become a party of coastal elites whose agenda is alien to most American families,” Nunes added.  

Much of the platform’s rise traces back to comments made by Fox News host Sean Hannity when he said “I saw that the president joined it on Jan. 8 following Twitter’s decision to permanently ban Donald Trump for inciting violence,” he added. “It’s like Twitter – it’s called Parler.”

While Trump never officially joined the platform, many of his supporters did in anticipation they would be able to continue following him, propelling the alt-tech platform to the top of Apple’s App Store.

Despite the platform adding roughly a million new followers each day, both Apple and Google soon banned Parler from their app stores, citing to its repeated failures to moderate violent hate speech on its platform.