Kanye West has agreed in principle to buy Parler, the social media service that has attracted fans of former President Donald J. Trump, the service’s parent company, Parlement Technologies, said in a news release on Monday.
“In a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves,” the rapper and fashion designer, who now goes by Ye, said in the statement released by Parlement Technologies, which did not disclose the agreed-upon price.
The announcement came a little over a week after Twitter and Instagram restricted Ye’s accounts in response to antisemitic remarks that he posted.
From its start in 2018, Parler, which is based is Nashville, has railed against censorship and has presented itself as a “free speech” social network, with less stringent content rules than sites such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. Last month, Parler, whose investors include the right-wing activist and heiress Rebekah Mercer, said it had raised $16 million, bringing its funding to $56 million. It is a competitor to Truth Social, which was founded by Mr. Trump.
Parler, which calls itself “the world’s pioneering uncancelable free speech platform,” currently ranks 108th for news apps in the U.S. iOS app store, according to Data.ai, a platform that provides consumer and market data. At its peak, it was No. 1, as millions of Trump supporters, critical of what they deemed censorship on Facebook and Twitter, signed up. Apple, Amazon and Google briefly kicked Parler off their platforms early last year after the app hosted calls for violence around the time of the Jan. 6 riot on Capitol Hill.
Ye and Parlement Technologies expect to finalize their agreement in principle during the fourth quarter of this year, the news release said.
A report this month from the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that only 6 percent of adults regularly seek out news from at least one of seven major alternative social media sites; in addition to Parler, they are BitChute, Gab, Gettr, Rumble, Telegram and Truth Social.
Of the 10,188 people surveyed, 38 percent had heard of Parler, Pew found. But despite the services’ limited reach, Pew found that most of the people who do frequent such places for news said they found like-minded company there.
Dan Wang, a strategy professor at Columbia Business School, said that Parler was an “incredibly niche” player, with limited influence and only a few hundred thousand monthly active users. “That’s really a drop in the bucket,” said Dr. Wang, whose research focuses on how social networks drive social and economic transformation. “Kanye West is a wealthy person and has a lot of resources, but not on the scale of being able to buy actually influential social media platforms.”
Over the weekend, the rap YouTube series Drink Champs released a new episode featuring Ye in which he repeated several antisemitic conspiracy theories and questioned the cause of the death of George Floyd, the Black man who was murdered in 2020 by a police officer in Minneapolis. (On Sunday, a lawyer representing Mr. Floyd’s family said they were considering filing a lawsuit against Ye for his statements about Mr. Floyd’s death.)
Earlier this month, Ye disrupted his YZY show at Paris Fashion Week by wearing a T-shirt featuring the words “White Lives Matter,” a phrase that the Anti-Defamation League has called hate speech. He was photographed at the show alongside Candace Owens, a conservative commentator who was wearing a similar shirt and whose husband, George Farmer, is the chief executive of Parlement Technologies. Mr. Farmer called Ye “a compatriot in the fight for free speech” in Monday’s statement.
After Ye wore the “White Lives Matter” T-shirt, Adidas said it was reviewing its partnership with him. Last month, Ye notified Gap via a letter that he was terminating their partnership involving the Yeezy Gap apparel line. Citing breach of contract, Ye said he was moving ahead with plans to open his own stores. Gap brand president, Mark Breitbard, wrote in a note to employees that Gap and Ye had not been “aligned” on how to work together to deliver their shared vision.
Tiffany Hsu and Alex Marshall contributed reporting.
