The far-right’s favoured social-media platform plots a comeback

AH, TWITTER IN 2020. X was just a letter in the alphabet. Elon Musk was preoccupied with implanting computer chips into pigs. Donald Trump wasn’t yet banned, though his tweets were loud, alarming—and getting fact-checked by the platform itself. Tired of liberal big-tech companies telling them what they could post, some Republicans had started to defect to a rival platform launched two years earlier: Parler. It looked similar to Twitter, but with less content moderation. More began to announce their migration from the nest with the hashtag #Twexit. “Hey @twitter, your days are numbered,” tweeted Brad Parscale, then Mr Trump’s campaign manager, with a link to Parler.