The board of Parler, a social media platform backed by Republican Party donor Rebekah Mercer and favored by US conservatives, has fired its CEO John Matze, he mentioned on Wednesday.
Matze confirmed the move to Reuters, immediately after it was initially reported by Fox News, and mentioned that he had not been offered a settlement.
“On January 29, 2021, the Parler board controlled by Rebekah Mercer decided to immediately terminate my position as CEO of Parler. I did not participate in this decision,” Matze mentioned in a memo sent to Parler employees.
“Over the past few months, I’ve met constant resistance to my product vision, my strong belief in free speech and my view of how the Parler site should be managed.”
He told Reuters that Parler now has an “executive committee” consisting of Matthew Richardson and Mark Meckler.
Mercer, Richardson, Meckler and Parler did not straight away respond to requests for comment.
Parler remains largely offline immediately after becoming dropped by Seattle-based Amazon’s cloud-hosting division and the app shops of Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google following the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol.
The providers cited Parler’s record of policing violent content, immediately after far-ideal groups spread violent rhetoric on the platform ahead of the unrest in Washington.
Parler, which was founded in 2018 and has claimed it has more than 12 million customers, has styled itself as a “free speech-driven” space.
The app has largely attracted US conservatives who disagree with guidelines about content on social media web sites like Facebook Inc and Twitter Inc.
Matze told Reuters on Jan 13 that Parler may well be offline for excellent, but later pledged it would return stronger.
(This story has not been edited by TheSpuzz employees and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)