All three companies have said that they took action against Parler, which is popular amongst right-wingers, because of its refusal to moderate hate speech and content that incites violence on the platform.
“What we disagreed about was whether the first resort—especially it wouldn’t be any resort for us in a normal situation—would be to subject people to 24/7 surveillance, to doing all of the data mining that the other platforms do.”
Peikoff continued: “That was not part of our monetization model. We think surveillance is contrary to the spirit of the Fourth Amendment. If you have a particular suspicion, that’s when you surveil, that’s when you get information about them, have a search warrant, etc.
“So on Parler, our disagreement was that we did not want to put in an algorithm that would subject everybody on the entire platform to 24/7 surveillance. We wanted to handle this content in a way that respected the privacy of people and that’s where we’re disagreeing now.
“The tech giants want their model to be the standard for the entire internet and to us, we think that that takes Orwell’s 1984 from a dystopian novel and turns it into an instruction manual for everybody to follow.”
Prior to this, Apple and Google called on Parler to implement a content moderation policy, which the site opted against.
The two companies subsequently pulled the Parler app from their respective app stores, with Google saying that content on Parler represented “ongoing and urgent public safety threat,” and Apple saying that the site “appears to continue to be used to plan and facilitate yet further illegal and dangerous activities.”
Peikoff, however, has argued that hate speech and other violent content doesn’t only exist on Parler.
John Matze, the CEO of Parler, initially predicted that the site might remain unavailable for “up to a week” as it sought an alternative web hosting service, but that appears to be proving difficult.
“So we’ve had to put pieces of this puzzle back together again. We’re working very consistently to do that and we think we’re going to be able to do it soon, but it is a struggle and it’s pretty amazing these days how difficult it can be to try to compete in this market.”
