Parler CEO John Matze Says He Was Fired

John Matze, the chief govt of the embattled social media platform Parler, stated on Wednesday that he was fired final week.

Mr. Matze, 27, who co-founded the location in 2018, stated in an interview that he was not given an evidence for the choice. He stated he believed he was fired due to a distinction in opinion with the distinguished Republican political donor Rebekah Mercer, who helps Parler financially.

Ms. Mercer, he stated, didn’t appear to need to impose any restrictions on what customers might say on Parler, which has billed itself as a “free speech” social community. While that open philosophy made the location well-liked with conservatives, it additionally led to bother.

Last month, Parler was faraway from Apple’s and Google’s app shops and booted from Amazon’s web-hosting platform for not being strict sufficient in policing and eradicating posts that attempted to incite violence or crime.

“I’ve always been about free speech and everyone being welcome. I’ve never been about conservative political activism,” Mr. Matze stated. But he stated he had instructed Ms. Mercer that Parler wanted to contemplate limiting home terrorists, white supremacists and members of QAnon, the baseless pro-Trump conspiracy principle, from posting on the platform.

“I got dead silence as a response, and I took that dead silence as disagreement,” he stated.

Millions of people began flocking to Parler, a platform similar to Twitter, after the November presidential election, when mainstream sites like Facebook and Twitter became more aggressive about curtailing hate speech and misinformation. Last month, after a mob of former President Donald J. Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, partly at Mr. Trump’s urging, Twitter and Facebook cut him off from their sites entirely.