Parler, the free speech social media platform maligned by political partisans and their media associates has responded with a letter to the House Oversight Committee which is currently investigating the company for failing to “police” its content before the January 6th riot.
The social media company reports it alerted the FBI more than 50 times of posts indicating the violent action at the Capitol posted on its site. The Wall Street Journal reports:
The social-media site referred a number of posts to law enforcement, including one on Dec. 24 from a user who called for an “armed force” of 150,000 people to “react to the congressional events of January 6,” according to the letter, which included the post and communications with FBI officials among its exhibits and has been reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Parler said it forwarded to the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Jan. 2 a series of posts from a user saying he would be wearing body armor to the pro-Trump rally on Jan. 6. “It’s no longer a protest,” Parler quoted the post as saying. “This is a final stand where we are drawing the red line at Capitol Hill. I trust the American people will take back the USA with force and many are ready to die to take back #USA.”
Lawyers representing Parler, Michael S. Dry and Ephraim “Fry” Wernick, wrote in the letter to the Oversight Committee, “These referrals represent only a fraction of the dozens of posts with violent rhetoric that Parler collected and forwarded to the FBI for investigation in the days leading up to January 6th.”
Parler has come under fire from its competitors over the company’s free speech policy, which does not curate user feeds or use purported fact checkers to suppress political opinions deemed unacceptable by elite thought leaders in the mainstream culture. The platform was blacklisted by big tech companies like Amazon who terminated their hosting services and Apple and Google who removed the Parler application from their stores to prevent downloads of the social media app.
Although the Democrat-controlled Oversight Committee is targeting Parler, an independent study by Forbes revealed that in the over 200 charging documents filed by DOJ in connection with the Capitol riots, 73 included references to post on Facebook, 24 referenced YouTube, and 20 referenced Instagram. In contrast, there were only 8 references to Parler. In addition, the FBI thanked Parler for helping law enforcement before and after January 6, reports the Journal.
“Far from being the far-right instigator and rogue company that Big Tech has portrayed Parler to be, the facts conclusively demonstrate that Parler has been a responsible and law-abiding company focused on ensuring that only free and lawful speech exists on its platform,” Messrs. Dry and Wernick wrote.
Parler Letter to Chairwoman Maloney
