NEW YORK: The chief executive of social media platform Parler, popular with American right-wing users but which virtually vanished after the U.S. Capitol riot, posted a brief message on the company's website. Parler's app, however, remains offline.
"Hello world, is this thing on?," John Matze asked in a message dated Saturday, posted above a note from the company saying the platform would be restored after challenges were resolved.
Agencies
Parler CEO John Matze's message on the website.
A little over a week ago, Apple Inc suspended the Parler from its App Store, shortly after Alphabet-owned Google banned it from Google Play. The app is still unavailable for download on both platforms.
Amazon.com Inc then suspended Parler from its web hosting service, effectively taking the site offline unless it can find a new company to host its services.
U.S. right-wing social media users have flocked to Parler, along with other apps such as Telegram and social site Gab, citing the more aggressive policing of political comments on mainstream platforms such as Twitter Inc and Facebook Inc, which intensified after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
Facebook, Twitter Instagram: Tips & Tricks To Keep Social Media Private
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Protect Data
It seems counter intuitive – after all, social media helps you share your opinions and speak to a larger audience. But thanks to rampant identity theft and online stalking, there is a solid argument to be made to target your social posts instead of keeping them public. Karan Bajaj shows you how.
Modify Privacy Settings
Facebook has a dedicated section for privacy settings and tools (accessible in the Settings menu). In this section, you can choose who can see your future activity. For privacy, select Friends instead of Public. Also on the same page, you get the option to limit accessibility of your existing posts on the social network to only friends instead of everyone. You can also choose individual settings for items such as friend requests, email addresses access, phone number access and who can see your friends list. To step up your privacy, switch all these settings to ‘Friends Only’. We also recommend switching off access to search engines outside of Facebook.
Limit Info On Your Profile
By default, all the information in your profile is in the public domain. To change this, click on your profile picture on the top bar to view your profile. On this page, you can view all the information available to anyone who opens your profile page. Click the edit button (the small pencil icon) that appears inside the intro box and you can then customize your info. We recommend switching off all the items you want to keep private from prying eyes.
Hide Your Photos
Many regular Facebook users tend to upload a lot of photos to share with friends and family. However, you don’t want everyone who visits your profile to have access to all these memories either. One way to hide them is to delete them from Facebook after a few months. The other way is to edit the privacy settings for each photo album. Click on Photos > Albums. For any album that you want to limit access to, click the options button (the three dots on the right corner) on an individual album and choose edit. This will open the privacy settings for the album for which you can select only friends, family or only you.
Protected Tweets
Quite like Instagram, Twitter lets you hide your tweets from the world — this means they’ll only be visible to your existing followers and won’t show up in searches. You will also have to individually approve new followers from that point forward. To do this, go to the ‘Settings and Privacy’ section and look for ‘Privacy and Safety’. Here, you can switch-on the feature marked ‘Protect your Tweets’.