Parler was deplatformed and had its business critically undermined in the wake of the January 6 protests in Washington for no valid reason, and even cooperated with the FBI in advance by alerting them about possible threats.
This is what the company behind this social network said in a letter to the House Oversight Committee, after the chair of the committee, Caroline Maloney, asked the agency to investigate it, justifying the demand by saying that “numerous” Parler users have been arrested and charged.
The accusations against Parler come down to it representing the most important place online where rioters organized for the January 6 events, a charge that the company rejects. According to reports, the US Department of Justice’s own investigations suggest that more of this activity may have been happening on much bigger platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
In the letter signed by two lawyers for Parler and sent to the committee in response to Maloney’s action, Parler said that it in December started forwarding messages to the FBI posted on its platform, which it saw as organizing for violence, and included communication that it had with the agency as proof.
We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.
One of these messages from December 24 mentions an “armed force” consisting of 150,000 protesters who would descend on Capitol Hill on January 6, while several others from January 2 speak about taking back the US “with force” and those participating in the protests being ready to die.
The letter said that dozens of messages that contained violent rhetoric had been sent to the FBI before and after January 6.
The Wall Street Journal reported about this, noting that in the past, FBI officials denied that they knew of specific and credible threats ahead of the Capitol Hill events.
Otherwise, the letter refers to accusations that the company behind Paler was not owned by Americans or had ties with the Russians as conspiracy theories. The same is said of claims that it had offered a stake in the company to President Trump.
Instead, Parler said, it became a scapegoat after the riots and a victim of what is described as Big Tech’s unlawful and anticompetitive behavior against it.
