> other than taking a hard stance on free speech?

Every platform created for this reason that gains a large following does so specifically because it attracts people who recently got banned from some previous existing service for being terrible. See 8Chan post gamergate or Voat post-banning of r/fatpeoplehate. Not saying it's wrong to be pro-all-kinds-of-speech-allowed-on-platform-that-you-run, but those kinds of platforms usually only surge in popularity when a bunch of people get banned from a more mainstream platform where being a dick is against the rules.

Edit: don't want to make it sound like big tech companies like Twitter / FB and Amazon are "good" for doing this. They're only doing this because they feel pressure to do so. If the execs had a moral compass, they would treat every user the same, and ban people based on the same set of rules.

Every platform waxes poetic about "free speech" to users. Then they have to deal with the reality some users are more trouble than they're worth and they click ban. Or advertisers who pay the bills want "brand safety."

Parler is an astroturf social network founded by the funders of Trump’s campaign, Brexit and other such things. It’s not an alternate social network someone decided to run some day.

This does also mean that if it doesn’t die right now, eventually it will when the funders get tired of it.

> Have Parler done anything specific to attract extremists

The site was, for sure, intended originally as a right wing twitter. While they probably don't want extremists, per se, they have made absolutely no attempt to moderate legitimately violent rhetoric (c.f. the Lin Wood threat last week to have Pence executed, which seems extremely frightening in retrospect).

You can see some collected horror shows via aggregation like https://twitter.com/RWParlerWatch and https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/

It is Daily Stormer or 8kun? No, not yet. But it's really, really bad there.

I thought that MeWe was supposed to be the new "free speech platform" but then Parler sprung up, and the really vile stuff went over there.

although MeWe had quickly attracted racists and actual nazis too, though.

That's a shame, I'm somewhat of a free speech absolutist, barring calls for violence and other obvious illegal speech. Looking into Parlers record on moderation, they don't seem to live up to their own values, removing content that doesn't violate their values, as well as failing to remove content that does.

Kinda. I mean... look, they're just a partisan site. There's nothing new about that, their hook was that they looked like twitter and weren't a vbulletin or whatever.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. If it was just a bunch of right wingers hanging out and complaining, akin to the left-wingers you find on /r/politics or whatever, then no one would care.

But right wing grievance shifted over the Trump years into explicitly violent and insurrectionist rhetoric and imagery. And as of Wednesday that's no longer a theoretical threat.

Wait, what? You’d like to abolish free speech? Or is this an autocorrect for “absolutist?”

Ah, a typo yes.