As Donald Trump-Twitter war escalated during the election week, a conservative clone of the micro-blogging platform called Parler has seen a surge in downloads in the US, reaching nearly 1 million downloads.
According to data from SensorTower, Parler’s app saw 980,000 downloads in total between November 3 (Election Day) and November 8 on both Google Play Store and iOS App Store.
“More than half of those downloads (636,000) coming on Sunday alone,” reports The Verge. Parler was launched in August 2018 and has a significant user base of Trump supporters and conservatives.
Posts on the website often contain far-right content, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories.
Parler is currently the #1 free app in the iOS App Store, up from #1,023 on November 2.
It’s also #1 in the Google Play rankings, up from #486 the previous week. The app has been downloaded approximately 3.6 million times in the US so far, according to data from SensorTower.
The app markets itself as a “free speech” and unbiased alternative to mainstream social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.
However, journalists and users have criticized the service for content policies that are more restrictive than the company portrays, and sometimes more restrictive than those of its competitors.
As the vote count began from November 3, Trump tweeted or retweeted nearly 37 times and Twitter flagged 13 of those tweets.
Of those disclaimers, 12 indicated that “some or all of the content” about the election in the President’s tweet is “disputed” and possibly “misleading.”
Last Saturday, Twitter flagged nearly all tweets by Trump as he kept making “potentially misleading claims about an election” despite Democratic candidate Joe Biden winning the presidential race.
