Like many people on this site and elsewhere, I reacted with incredible horror at the events that unfolded this last week. And like many on this site, I was much less surprised than I would have liked to have been. This was a seismic event on a scale much greater and more dangerous to this country and, quite frankly, the entire world, than 9/11.
In my incessant ‘doom surfing’, trying to find information from anywhere and everywhere both to understand the magnitude of what happened and to get some of self-soothing that comes from being able to put things (especially traumatic things) in context, I came across this twitter thread from Dave Troy (davetroy.com) published Nov. 2020, that seemed to have slipped under the radar of the much wider press (completely understandable considering the focus of the national election), but has become far more interesting and critical now.
The thread goes into a timeline concerning Parler’s founding and the extremely unlikely story of it’s financing and backing. Further down the money quote is here:
This is ON TOP OF the fact that because Parler expressly “allows” their “influencer” verified accounts to monetize their posts and what have you, within the Parler’s TOS they request the information from IRS for W-9. From Parler's Privacy Policy:
Influencer Network Information. Unlike other platforms, Parler allows you to monetize your content, following, and goodwill. As part of that, the law requires us to collect certain pieces of personally identifiable information. Specifically, in addition to identification information (see above under “verification” for our collection and treatment of identifying information), we collect information on form W-9 as required by the IRS. We are required to do this in order to facilitate the receipt by you of payments earned on Parler. However, we store that information in secure, encrypted form. We never share it, sell it, or use it in any way other than for purposes of legal compliance.
Form W-9 includes Social Security Numbers and Tax ID numbers. I don’t believe that any other social media platform asks for SSN (I might be wrong here) and the real question I have, that can’t be answered at the moment since they are now off-line, is: Do they have these influencers fill out a form W-9 or do they simply say, “give us this information and don’t worry your pretty little head about it?”. To my reading, they collect the information themselves. I think an IRS investigation on the use and collection of that information might be warranted in light of current events.
It all looks extremely suspicious. I would not be surprised to see Parler reactivate (if it does) in the coming weeks on a Russian hosting service. That would be quite the tell.
Edit: I wanted to change the image I used to something more currently reflecting the state of Russian involvement. Sorry for the prior one. I’m not a graphics guy and it was done just as a way to draw attention to the content of the story with something that was easy for me to make quickly and by drawing on an historical (but no longer accurate) association.
At the recommendation of FatherFlot in the comments, I want to include Dave Troy’s thread from yesterday regarding how unlikely it is that Parler will be able to survive this:
Lastly, I would like to highlight my own comment regarding the Mercer’s financing of Parler. I think it is entirely possible for Parler to be both the product of home grown fascists like the Mercers as well as a operation influenced by Putin’s regime. These things have a lot of moving parts and there is plenty of room for a host of bad actors to involve themselves. Their interests overlap and align tremendously and there is ample precedent in both the NRA funding shenanigans we’ve seen in the last few years as well as the history of oligarchs in direct control of state apparatuses (like Ferdinand Marcos) working in coordination with those uber rich whose influence of state mechanisms is more indirect (like the Kochs and the Mercers).