The far-right’s favoured social-media platform plots a comeback

AH, TWITTER IN 2020. X was just a letter in the alphabet. Elon Musk was preoccupied with implanting computer chips into pigs. Donald Trump wasn’t yet banned, though his tweets were loud, alarming—and getting fact-checked by the platform itself. Tired of liberal telling them what they could post, some Republicans had started to defect to a rival platform launched two years earlier: Parler. It looked similar to Twitter, but with less content moderation. More began to announce their migration from the nest with the hashtag #Twexit. “Hey @twitter, your days are numbered,” tweeted Brad Parscale, then Mr Trump’s campaign manager, with a link to Parler.Parler has since earned a darker reputation. Messages exchanged on Parler have been presented in court as evidence to convict rioters who broke into the Capitol on January 6th 2021. Misinformation and far-right conspiracy theories shared on the platform came to the fore. The app was taken off the Apple and Google app stores (although it was later restored). A legal battle with Amazon Web Services, the cloud platform that hosted Parler, ensued. For a brief moment in 2022 Kanye West, a controversial rapper, attempted to buy it. The app eventually went down altogether.