Ye to no longer buy Parler

Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, will no longer purchase the alternative social media platform Parler, the company announced Thursday. 

Parler Technologies said in a statement the company “mutually agreed” with Ye to terminate the intent of sale of Parler in a decision made in “mid-November.”

“Parler will continue to pursue future opportunities for growth and the evolution of the platform for our vibrant community,” Parler Technologies said in a statement. 

In October, Ye announced his plans to acquire Parler, a platform that offers minimal content moderation and caters to a right-wing audience. The announcement came after Ye was banned from Twitter over antisemitic posts. He has since regained access to his Twitter account, along with other owners of previously banned accounts who have been allowed to return to the platform under changes by new CEO Elon Musk. 

The announcement of the decision to terminate the deal came the same day that Ye appeared on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s Infowars program and went on an antisemitic rant that included praise for Nazis and Adolf Hitler. 

Parler has failed to gain momentum in the past year and a half after spiking in January 2021, when mainstream platforms cracked down on incendiary posts about the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol and banned former President Trump’s accounts. It reached about 44.85 million visits that month at its height, according to data from SimilarWeb. 

Parler faced a sharp decline after the app was pulled from Apple and Google’s apps stores and the site from the web by Amazon Web Services. Traffic on the site fell to around 1.2 million visits each month for the past roughly 18 months, according to Similarweb’s data. 

Updated at 4:58 p.m.