Conservatives' favorite 'anti-censorship' platform Parler now censoring #WriteInTrumpforGA posts: report

On Tuesday, Newsweekreported that the alternative social network Parler is hiding posts tagged with "#WriteInTrumpforGA," an online campaign to convince Republican voters to reject Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler in the January runoff and write in Donald Trump in protest of Georgia's GOP officials' supposed disloyalty for allowing President-elect Joe Biden to carry the state.

"A user on Twitter shared a screenshot of Parler's search screen," reported James Crowley. "The screengrab shows no results for #WriteInTrumpforGA. However, a Newsweek search on Parler shows that there are 21 'Parleys' for the aforementioned hashtag, six for a #WriteInTrumpforSenateGA, and 52 for #WriteinTrumpGeorgiaRunoff."

Parler has gained popularity among right-wing activists and politicians in recent weeks, because the site sells itself as "anti-censorship," in contrast to sites like Facebook and Twitter which in recent months have taken more effort to remove posts containing fake news, hate speech, and election misinformation. Nevertheless, Parler too has been forced to adopt content rules of its own as its follower count has expanded and users have tested what they can and can't do on the site.

A conservative write-in campaign in the Senate runoffs in Georgia isn't actually possible, because runoff ballots do not provide a write-in option. However, GOP abstentions from the election, if they occurred in any significant numbers, would threaten to throw the race to Democratic candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, effectively eliminating the Republican majority in the Senate.

At least some of the social media content pushing the write-in protest appear to be driven by the Committee for American Sovereignty, a super PAC linked to former Trump strategist and longtime Republican trickster Roger Stone.