According to various sources, John Matze, the CEO and co-founder of the under-fire social network Parler has been fired by the company by its board of directors.
Matze’s employment end date on his LinkedIn page also denotes January 2021.
The network, of course, has come under scrutiny particularly after the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.
In the aftermath, both Apple and Google took the app off their respective stores and Amazon also ended their run as the AWS host for the site. Parler moved to sue Amazon but was denied by a judge.
Just four days after the insurrection at the Capitol, Matze said in an interview that most of the company’s vendors had already jumped ship. For all of these reasons, Matze was terminated by the board led by prominent conservative donor Rebekah Mercer.
Matze claims he was fired because of his “strong belief in free speech” and a product vision that was “what I believe is a more effective approach to content moderation”.
Parler also had issues when it comes to privacy and user data. A great amount of user data was scraped and is now being used as evidence against many who made posts about being inside of the Capitol.
In addition, the House Oversight Committee even asked the FBI to investigate the involvement of the social media network in this attack.
After getting kicked off of Amazon, Parler now uses the hosting services of Epik, which also supports free speech leaning sites such as 8chan and Gab.
Many of the site’s users have already jumped ship and it remains to be seen what is in store for the future of the social networking destination.
