My adventures on Parler, Team Trump's great right hope for social media

Time to jump ship from Twitter? US President Donald Trump. Photo / AP

"Hey @twitter, your days are numbered," Donald Trump's campaign manager Brad Parscale wrote in a tweet, linking to one of his posts on Parler - a newish social network that's got a lot of buzz over the past few days.

Parler was founded in 2018 by John Matze, now 27.

Facebook and Twitter have started to label some of the US President's more outrageous posts over the past month, and generally taken a harder line on hate speech, partly in reaction to an advertiser boycott.

Matze says at the same time, membership of his self-styled free speech-friendly Twitter-alternative has doubled to 1.7m.

Image / Parler

Its name means talk in French, and it was originally pronounced "parlay", but in mass usage it's come to be pronounced phonetically.

I decided to sign-up to Parler to take part in this historic shift and mostly it's been … boring.

Drama comes from conflict, and Parler has next-to-none.

Alt-right figures post alt-right headlines, then their alt-right followers agree with the sentiment.

Parler's equivalent of a Twitter or Facebook "like" is called, without any apparent irony, an "echo".

I did find a hint of life after a Rudy Giuliani post on flag burning.

Giuliani echoed a screenshot of a tweet from @realDonalTrump_ that read "RETWEET IF WE SHOULD ENFORCE ONE YEAR IN JAIL FOR BURNING THE AMERICAN FLAG"

No one in the comment thread referenced the fact that @realDonalTrump_ is a fake Trump account on Twitter but, whatever, it was a Trumpy enough sentiment (and the Giuliani account that reposted it was real - or at least had the gold "P" that serves as Parler's equivalent of a blue verified tick on Twitter).

But at least there were some libertarian-right comments raised against this nationalist-right sentiment.

@lgbtjew posted, "How about no consequences, since it's a free country and if i purchase a flag with my own money i can do what i want with it.

@Purpleparty offered, "A lawyer should recognize freedom of speech by now."

And @Herronisland said, "Ever hear of the First Amendment? SCOTUS [the Supreme Court of the United States] has ruled flag burning is allowed as free speech, a**hole."

Some grist for the mill there, but none of those comments got a single reply.

Parler goes to Hollywood

Parler auto-suggested I follow the actor James Woods, whom the Telegraph dubbed "The angriest Republican in Hollywood" and a "MAGA martyr".

That promised some entertainment.

But it turned out Woods' last post was on April 2, when he said, "Decided to go back on Twitter. Sorry I never contributed more here. God Bless President Trump and God Bless America."

There was a purple badge on "James Woods" indicating it was a parody account, though its posts were pretty straight-down-the-line Biden-bashing.

I thought I might have better luck wih Laura Loomer, a low-level Republican congressional candidate who was banned from Twitter for repeating untrue, anti-Muslim statements about Ilhan Omar, a Somali refugee who is one of two Muslim women elected to Congress.

Loomer is known for outrageous claims. According to Buzzfeed, she once implied she was under surveillance by the FBI because she allegedly saw a Wi-Fi network titled "FBI Surveillance Van," a common joke. So I thought her feed would at least be colourful.

But it turned out Loomer had difficulty string a sentence together, and an over-familiarity with ALL CAPS.

And she was difficult scroll as she took full advantage of the fact that Parler allows posts of up to 1000 characters (to Twitter's 280).

Looking through Loomer's followers, many had zero posts and zero followers.

A gold-badged Sean Hannity account, which had 617,000 followers to the Fox News host's 5 million on Twitter, was routine. He posted a headline a day, and didn't interact with commenters. There's no frisson, no energy.

Trois Erics

Team Trump, which joined Parler after being banned from Twitch and Reddit, does have a sizeable following of 1.1m. But the account's Parler incarnation is merely a laundry list of campaign events, and RSVP and registration reminders.

Parler recommended three different Eric Trump accounts, which was democratic, I guess, but by then I was too wary to sample any of them.

There were a number of nutbar Covid-19 and 5G conspiracy theories, but not more or less loopy than you find on certain corners of mainstream social media.

It was time for me to contribute. I posted a recent article, Trump's highest-profile New Zealand backer walks away, figuring that might rark the Parler crowd from its slumber. I did get three comments, but they were all welcoming me to Parler and presumably auto-generated.

I instantly gained two followers, both of whom were advertisers - which made me recalled the first line of Parler's privacy statement, which the service said "Discloses some or all of the ways we gather, use, disclose and manage a customer or client's data." Some? Geebers.

Parler supports gifs and videos, but multimedia is scant. There's little humour, and language is surprisingly above-board. Matze will seemingly allow almost any political claim, but bans scatalogical references, for example.

I can't find any Kiwi Twitter of Facebook users on the right.

Trump ne parle pas

And, of course, the Big Guy is not present, which is Parler's biggest weakness.

Trump has 82.7m users on Twitter, and another 28m on Facebook. And while only diehards would follow his every tweet, his presence on those networks is sufficiently large for him to set the news agenda, and get broad themes across to the mainstream even if many are dubious about his individual posts.

Whatever his campaign manager says, The Showman is not going to leave that size audience behind.