San Francisco, New York There is movement in the world of conservative Twitter competitors: Kanye West, well-known rapper and ex-husband of Kim Kardashian, wants to buy the social media platform Parler. The company announced this on Monday. A purchase price was not mentioned.
The billionaire, who changed his name to “Ye”, had flirted with a presidential candidacy for the Republicans in the past and recently caused scandals with anti-Semitic statements in particular. Among other things, he accused the rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs of being controlled by Jews. That’s why the 45-year-old was blocked on Twitter and Instagram.
Earlier this month, he also faced criticism for wearing a White Lives Matter t-shirt to present his collection at Paris Fashion Week. The sporting goods giant Adidas then put the cooperation with the artist to the test.
Now West apparently wants to secure its own mouthpiece with Parler, which sees itself as a conservative rival to Twitter. “In a world where conservative opinions are considered controversial, we need to make sure we have the right to express ourselves freely,” West commented on the acquisition on Monday.
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With the purchase of Parler, both West and ex-US President Donald Trump would have their own social media platform. Both want to prevent their posts from being blocked, as happened to Trump after the storming of the Capitol in Washington in January 2021.
At that time, US Internet platforms such as Twitter and Facebook had banned the then US President. Parler has also been temporarily removed from the Google and Apple app stores.
Trump and his supporters responded by building their own platforms. But so far they have not been able to reach a mass audience, as a data analysis by the market researcher Data.ai for the Handelsblatt shows. For the evaluation, the Handelsblatt chose the right-wing platform Gettr in addition to Truth Social by Donald Trump and Parler. None of the providers publish data on the number of users themselves.
According to analyzes by Data.ai, the Trump network Truth Social had around half a million daily active users in April. In May, the number rose to 725,000. However, the following month it fell sharply to 261,000. The competing social networks Parler and Gettr had significantly lower user numbers.
In comparison with the short message service Twitter, the providers appear to be very small. Twitter averaged more than 30 million daily active users between April and June, according to Data.ai.
Truth Social download numbers plummet
There are still no validated figures for the number of active users for the following months. But there are figures on how often the associated app was downloaded. According to this, Truth Social only had 95,000 downloads in September – a few weeks before the important midterm elections. In April there were still 1.1 million downloads.
Former US President Donald Trump’s network had just 261,000 active users in June.
(Photo: REUTERS)
Thus, neither Truth Social, Parler nor Gettr managed to reach a wide audience in the USA. For comparison: Ex-President Donald Trump had more than 80 million followers on Twitter before his ban, on Truth Social there are currently just over four million – although the figures from Data.ai suggest that the number of active users is only in the range of several hundred thousand.
The Trump platform is also not doing well financially at the moment. Actually, the ex-president wanted to bring Truth Social to the stock exchange by merging with the shell company DWAC. Investors wanted to support the transaction with a total of one billion dollars. But the process falters.
Truth Social is said to have failed to pay bills
Even Fox News, which is actually well-disposed towards the former US President, reported on the network’s financial problems. Hosting provider Rightforge provided the digital infrastructure for Truth Social but is awaiting payment of $1.6 million in unpaid bills, according to Fox News.
In addition, Google had blocked the app in the Play Store, which is used to install most applications on smartphones with the Google Android operating system. “Effective systems for moderating user-generated content are a condition of our Terms of Service,” a Google spokesman said. Significant violations were found at Truth Social.
The non-governmental organization Public Citizen accused Truth Social of allowing cases of hate speech but censoring liberal political opinions. Nevertheless, the app was reinstated in Google’s App Store last week.
DWAC is also under a lot of pressure on the stock exchange. While the shares reached a high of around $97 in March, the price is currently only a fifth of that at $17.40.
The future of Truth Social could also be strongly influenced by the further course of Twitter. Tesla boss Elon Musk announced after a long back and forth that he still wanted to buy Twitter for 44 billion dollars.
This could have consequences for Donald Trump. Finally, Musk had announced that he would allow the ex-president to return on Twitter. He publicly declined the offer. However, a number of tech experts suspected that Trump could hardly resist the reputation of Twitter and its possibilities. “Twitter gives him real reach, Truth Social is just an echo chamber,” says tech journalist Kara Swisher.
Problems with Parler
Parler, now being bought by West, is also facing significant problems. In the meantime, the platform has not only been blocked by Apple and Google, but also Amazon’s cloud service has withdrawn infrastructure from the platform. As a result, Parler was unusable for a long time.
Under the new boss George Farmer, the platform laid off a number of employees. “The company was in chaos when I took over,” Farmer said. He promised improvements. Then in August, like Truth Social, Parler was banned from Google. In contrast to Donald Trump’s platform, however, Parler managed to be activated again after a short time.
The third network, Gettr, was founded by Trump’s former press secretary, Jason Miller. However, it never garnered as much attention as Truth Social.
Although there is a part of the population in the USA that continues to support Trump and is looking for alternative platforms, the offer is highly fragmented, the US polling institute Pew Research summarized.
At the same time, around three quarters of users of networks such as Truth Social or Parler also use more established platforms such as Twitter, Facebook or YouTube. The new offers from Trump and his supporters do not seem to have succeeded in undermining the great power of the dominant networks.
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