Starboard announced that it has concluded the acquisition of Parler

April 17, 2023 8:16 AM

"No reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone just for conservatives is a viable business any more," reads the opening statement of a press release by Starboard Media on their recent acquisition of the conservative social media platform Parler.
posted by slogger (32 comments total)

This either confuses or enrages me (emphasis mine):

While the Parler app as it is currently constituted will be pulled down from operation to undergo a strategic assessment, we at Starboard see tremendous opportunities across multiple sectors to continue to serve marginalized or even outright censored communities – even extending beyond domestic politics.

Advancements in AI technology, along with the existing code base and other new features, provide an opportunity for Starboard to begin servicing unsupported online communities – building a home for them away from the ad-hoc regulatory hand of platforms that hate them.

Are they really playing the victim again/still??

Or is this a victory lap carrying the freshly-severed head of Parler by someone who actually will serve "marginalized or even outright censored communities"?
posted by wenestvedt at 8:21 AM on April 17, 2023 [12 favorites]

My thoughts, exactly… The letter states that they have an existing audience/customer base, but who do they mean?
posted by njohnson23 at 8:26 AM on April 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

Are they really playing the victim again/still??

It’s a signal that they bought Parler for it’s easily-manipulated audience, and intend to leverage their grievances for money.
posted by mhoye at 8:27 AM on April 17, 2023 [31 favorites]

I should've added that I found out about this from The Rightening daily newsletter.
posted by slogger at 8:30 AM on April 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

I can't tell from the tone of that press release if it's meant to be taken at face value or read with some kind of wink and a nod. And if there is a wink and a nod, just who is it directed toward?

What a bizarre piece of writing.

And I guess it's becoming clear that the techbros have decided that the right wing needs to be courted, and then possibly fleeced. Not sure I'm happy about the courting bit.
posted by hippybear at 8:38 AM on April 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

n.b. 'starboard' = 'right' in nautical parlance
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 8:39 AM on April 17, 2023 [45 favorites]

Parler doesn't even have a big enough audience to fleece does it? What'd they buy it for, $25.99?

"While the Parler app as it is currently constituted will be pulled down from operation to undergo a strategic assessment"

If it had a real audience, this would kill it.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:48 AM on April 17, 2023 [8 favorites]

It's hard to be the Twitter for Nazis when Anal Musk has taken care of that already with regular Twitter.
posted by reiichiroh at 8:50 AM on April 17, 2023 [23 favorites]

The one thing I never got about Parler—and excuse me if this is well and generally known—is why a far-right-wing media/social platform took a French name. I mean, I get the parler/parlor pun, but this is the same shitstream that produced "freedom fries" and "Iraq first, France next" t-shirts. So, why brand the site with a French name?
posted by the sobsister at 8:52 AM on April 17, 2023 [8 favorites]

When they say "marginalized or even outright censored communities", they're still referring to themselves. Maybe the even more strident and illegal conservative opinions that Parler, under the guise of a real company, still had to censor.
posted by meowzilla at 8:54 AM on April 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

So, why brand the site with a French name?

Five gets you two that the brand consultants speak no French and had no idea.

Note that this is not purely a theoretical thing. My longtime employer (after I left) launched a new magazine with a single word title that was an innocuous noun in English and a homophone for a unpleasant adjective in French. Bilingual country, bilingual organization; monolingual anglos running the show.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:10 AM on April 17, 2023 [12 favorites]

Freedom fries was twenty years ago. The online right in 2023 doesn't give a shit about Iraq.
posted by saturday_morning at 9:37 AM on April 17, 2023 [11 favorites]

I'm not even sure that there was any intention to use a French word. I've guessed that the name is a pun on "Parlour" -- as in a room where you receive guests -- crossed with the "-er" ending of Twitter. "Any similarity to French words living or dead is purely coincidental"
posted by Quindar Beep at 9:41 AM on April 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

"No reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone just for conservatives is a viable business any more," ... which is no problem, as we are unreasonable people.
posted by chavenet at 9:45 AM on April 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'm a bit confused by this also. Why would you buy an online property and then immediately kill it? I mean, they must have paid someone for the IP and domain at the very least, and that seller presumably sold it to them and ran all the way to the bank.

Unless "Starboard" is a stalking horse for the SPLC or something, which doesn't seem to be the case from what I can tell, it doesn't make a ton of sense.

Who's business plan was this, Judge Doom?
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:45 AM on April 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

Maybe they can reach out to “anti woke” types that think they are not conservatives.
posted by Artw at 9:52 AM on April 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oh wait, that’s Substack, never mind.
posted by Artw at 9:53 AM on April 17, 2023 [21 favorites]

Just bought it for the mailing list? Better targeting of ultra conservatives / the fringe of the republican party than just calling everyone with a landline phone?
posted by subdee at 10:03 AM on April 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

My theory is that (a) the buyer is just another person with money to burn and (b) what they are really buying is entry into the right-wing media elite. It doesn't matter that they have no viable plan to actually make money because it's a vanity project.
posted by anhedonic at 10:05 AM on April 17, 2023 [7 favorites]

To be fair, it's yet to be proven that a Twitter clone for Twitter users is a viable business either. The site was already in the red before The World's Specialest Boy was forced to buy it. Every "successful" tech company is a scheme to baffle the investors with bullshit in the form of phantasmal future value. These people aren't unique in today's information economy.
posted by jy4m at 10:06 AM on April 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

Mailing list and permission to mail, no less.
posted by jaduncan at 11:23 AM on April 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

Advancements in AI technology, along with the existing code base and other new features, provide an opportunity for Starboard to begin servicing unsupported online communities – building a home for them away from the ad-hoc regulatory hand of platforms that hate them.

Did... did the AI write the press release?
posted by The Bellman at 12:14 PM on April 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

Feels like a Producers 2.0 move -- more profitable as a flop than a success. Charge the feds a fee for every warrant and subponena served, and then buy the most criminal userbase you can find.
posted by pwnguin at 1:27 PM on April 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

I wonder if the strategy for buying it and shutting it down is to push its users back to Twitter.
posted by Jon_Evil at 2:30 PM on April 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Well, a bit of poking around I see that Starboard is a company that already hosts some other right wing websites. With the letter mentioning "By refocusing on the cloud and IT infrastructure space George Farmer [creator of Parler] has done an exceptional job at successfully leading Parlement [which the Parler company was rebranded to just recently] into a critically important industry where it has already begun to excel."

I'm guessing there is something going on with what Farmer was doing/acquiring/developing on that cloud/IT back end that interested Starboard. This might more of a tech deal than an address book deal.
posted by hippybear at 4:12 PM on April 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

So, why brand the site with a French name?

I imagine the original intent was nostalgia for par-ley or discussion, a word known by frontier trappers and warring parties. It also hints at living off the land and limited government (both of which Davy Crockett is famous for, besides dying at the Alamo). It didn't seem to carry forward for proper pronunciation.
posted by Brian B. at 7:05 PM on April 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

Probably a riff on parley from Pirates of the Caribbean.
posted by Mitheral at 9:27 PM on April 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

A lot of acquisitions are less about the platform and more about the list of emails associated with that platform. I'm sure getting a huge list of explicitly right-wing people and data about their conversations leading up to an election will be beneficial to interested parties.
posted by slimepuppy at 8:26 AM on April 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's just more than emails - Parler verification requires the submitter to upload photos of their government-issued ID as well as a recent picture. There's also direct messages and location data.
posted by meowzilla at 8:57 AM on April 18, 2023 [3 favorites]

I didn't realize that. That's an incredible grift and it makes even more sense.

The actual content being discussed and "community" is secondary to the data.
posted by slimepuppy at 10:32 AM on April 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

From all the way back in 2012, Rick Perlstein in The Baffler digs into the long history of conservatives being fertile ground for snake oil, scams, and get-rich-quick schemes: The Long Con.
posted by soundguy99 at 4:42 PM on April 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

Why do ships use "port" and "starboard" instead of "left" and "right?"
posted by Brian B. at 11:39 PM on April 18, 2023