P
ARLER, A SMALL but rapidly growing social network, is an unlikely candidate for liberal sympathy. Pronounced “parlour”, it gained popularity mainly with right-wing Americans fleeing what they saw as the lefty tendencies of Twitter and Facebook. Yet alarm at the company’s fate has crossed America’s political divide in a way that suspending the president from Twitter and Facebook has not.
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On January 8th, after the two better-known sites banned President Donald Trump, Parler jumped to the top of Apple’s app store in America, nearly quadrupling downloads in a day. The same day Google removed the app from its store for Android phones, citing its weak moderation policy, followed the next day by Apple. So did other providers of important back-end services, with names like Twilio and ZenDesk, that few outside the tech industry have heard of. The end came when