| Hey it's Josh. Brad Parscale, President Donald Trump's campaign manager, directed a tweet at Twitter Inc. itself on June 18. "Hey @twitter your days are numbered," he wrote. The post showed a screenshot of a tweet from the president that Twitter had flagged as containing manipulated media, along with an endorsement of Parler, a social network that markets itself as a pro-free-speech alternative. But since then, Parscale has sent over 150 tweets. He has sent only three Parleys, the official name of posts on Parler. Parscale's initial endorsement was part of a miniature wave last month of conservatives pushing Parler as respite from the social media networks they saw as dangerously liberal. The app has been downloaded 2.5 million times, and almost half those came last month, according to Sensor Tower, a firm that tracks the mobile app business. While that number is substantial, it's a small fraction of an app like, say, TikTok, which has more than 2 billion downloads and adds tens of millions each month. So far in July, over half of Parler's installations have come from Brazil. It's all had the feeling of a fad and, as the Daily Beast noted earlier this week, there are signs it has begun to burn out. Sensor Tower data provided to Bloomberg also show new downloads slowing significantly in recent weeks. The reason comes down to a somewhat obvious point: People seeking a platform for their political views gravitate towards the places with the largest audiences. Conservatives have struggled to break free from Silicon Valley's social media behemoths before. Milo Yiannopoulos, who actually was banned from Twitter and Facebook Inc., complained last fall to his 19,000 Telegram followers that they weren't worth his time. "It's nice to have a little private chat with my gold star homies but I can't make a career out of a handful of people like that," he said, according to screenshots posted by Vice last September. Yiannopoulos went on to say that Gab, another social network the right once hoped would supplant Twitter, was full of teenage racists, and complained that "no one" uses Parler. "Unless something monumental happens, we are just going to be driven off the internet forever," he wrote. But in order to catch on monumentally, social media platforms need to offer some new form of expression or community. Better content moderation policies or particular politics haven't yet proven to be a durable selling point. That would be true even if Parler had more permissive policies than incumbents like Twitter, which it doesn't seem to. Of course, not everyone who joined Parler has abandoned it. Republican Congresspeople like Jeff Jordan and Elise Stefanik continue to post regularly, with messages that largely mirror what they continue to put up on Twitter. This pattern of use kind of raises the question of what the purpose of Parler is. As right-wing talk show host Bill Mitchell put it, the app's main appeal may be as "a backup if Twitter deletes you." Parscale, one of the app's more prominent champions, has only put up 10 posts over Parler's lifetime. The first one is a photo of Parscale with Parler's CEO. Four others are complaints about how Parler works. And in recent weeks, like most people giving some obscure new app a try, he seems to have lost interest and gone back to his regular life. Parler does seem to be a good measuring stick for the amount of anger conservatives online have for mainstream tech companies. But having a social network controlled by people who share your political beliefs doesn't necessarily mean that it will be useful. As Parscale put it in a Parley in May: "I want to love it. I want to use it. I want it to help. However, more than anything I want to win in November." —Joshua Brustein | 
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