Starboard said on Friday that it has bought Parler for an undisclosed amount and will temporarily shut down the social media app popular with U.S. conservatives to give itself time to roll out a revamped version of the platform.
A deal that would have had seen American rapper Kanye West, who now goes by Ye, buy the platform's parent company Parlement Technologies.
In 2018, Starboard, formerly Olympic Media, has established conservative-leaning platforms such as American Wire and BizPac Review. It is aiming to build a home for unsupported online communities and service them away from the ad-hoc regulatory hand of platforms that hate them. The conglomerate, based in Arlington, Virginia, declined to respond to a Reuters request for details of the deal. However, it added that the acquisition will be accretive by the end of the second quarter of 2023.
Parler announced in September it has restructured into Parlement Technologies Inc and acquired Dynascale Inc, a private cloud services firm based in Irvine, California.
Parler is one of several social media platforms, including Gettr, Gab, and Truth Social, that have positioned themselves as free-speech alternatives to Twitter Inc prior to its $44 billion acquisition by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
No reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone only for conservatives is a viable business any more, Starboard said.