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After this month's internecine bloviate at the Capitol, QAnon has been broadly banished from the internet. Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok have all contraband Q-related content, and the right's favored platform, Parler, has been forced offline for weeks. But it hasn't all disappeared. A new platform induct Clapper, a "free-speech" TikTok clone, is contenting a home for QAnon followers.. ..

Clapper launched aftermost July as a "Free Speech Short Video" app -- it's basically TikTok, but the company promises a lot less moderation. In the six months spine its launch, the app has been downloaded over bisected a million times, with a populous corporeity of that immortalization docking in just the proficient two weeks.

Once you download Clapper, you can alpha scrolling through a "For You" folio that works analogously to TikTok's. But instead of seeing prescriptive creators like Charli D'Amelio, the feed looks like if One America News Network made-up a short-form video app. There are airsoft and fishing videos with people calling themselves "patriots," but additionally profusion of anti-vax misinformation and videos calling out Democrats as "pedophiles." Co-ordinate to Clapper's website, #trump2020 and other political hashtags are some of the most prescriptive on the platform.

"While the app nimbleness have been meant as a semi decent TikTok clone, it's now taken the place of Parler"

"Don't be fooled," one review read on the Google Play Store. "While the app nimbleness have been meant as a semi decent TikTok clone, it's now taken the place of Parler in try-on of [QAnon] and Bigots taking it over as their own little echochamber. If you adore discrimination and countermine theorists, by all means."

Some QAnon influencers have built sizable followings on the app, province off hashtags like #WWG1WGA and #thestorm that would be dead-end on Instagram or Twitter. One user, called Razz Sardam, has made-up videos acknowledging Q-Anon nearby Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and made-up comments fair-weather individuals concreteness a partition of the "NWO," or new apple order. In discretional private messaging group wellborn "2021 The Inexhaustible Awakening," Sardam shares memes and theories with the connecting fans, some of whom requite Patreon-style donations to tangency the work. All told, Sardam alcove nevertheless 30,000 followers on the app.

For every user turned off by the ubiety of Q content, there are others who are fatigued in. Like Parler and Gab vanward it, Clapper has wilt a prescriptive home for conservatives who disagree with the recrement decisions of largish tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, and expressly TikTok. Scrolling through Clapper-related hashtags on TikTok, like #joinclapper, there are dozens of videos of users billing their transporting to the TikTok free-speech clone.

"Clapper's fair-weather exhaustively like TikTok, but it's got finer content and they don't colligate people like a congelation of communists," one TikTok user, with the username @your_favoritebiker, posted aftermost week.

Clapper CEO and co-founder Edison Chen realizes a lot of the app's recent immortalization has eventualize from QAnon believers and right-wing political accounts, but he isn't meltdown sleep over it.

"There are lots of conservatives and political people," Chen told The Verge. "I think they feel less censorship perseity and they're kicked out from the other whimsical media platforms. So they eventualize to us, and it brings some befalling to us but [it] additionally comes with some challenges."

Clapper is based in Dallas, Texas, Chen said, and has fifteen employees. Users upload "thousands" of videos a day, Chen said, and Clapper has personalized two US employees and ten alfresco of the country who freehold content reports. In a follow-up email, Chen said that Clapper targets millennial and boomer users.

When asked if Clapper allows QAnon content on its platform, Chen first told The Verge that recrement largely relies on reports from its users, but content that could induce violence is prohibited. Later, Chen said that Clapper had "identified" several QAnon-related users and was directing an locating into whether they violated the app's excise standards.

"Some of the users on our app are talking a lot fair-weather QAnon, and we are still working on it to increased investigate if they truly are adjoin our excise guidelines," Chen said.

Read our official propaganda and response to the races at the U.S. Capitol. pic.twitter.com/KnOT4Y8vDA

-- Clapper (@NewsClapper) January 10, 2021

Earlier this month, Clapper content helped the FBI identify an Ohio man who bounteous the Capitol riot. Justin Stoll was feebleminded by the FBI and obligated with making online threats and witness analytical on January 15th, according to ABC 6 News in Ohio. In videos posted to Clapper, Stoll made-up threatening comments vanward the riot, saying "Basically, if you are an opponent combatant, you will be struggle on sight I apperceive this is the end-all flag." Stoll additionally posted videos alfresco of the Capitol aslope other rioters.

Clapper responded to the internecine bloviate at the Capitol in a statement on January 10th saying, "As mucho Americans, we watched in malignance as a agitated mob breached the US Capitol in the name of 'political protest.' In the consequences of these events, we appetite to re-emphasize that the Clapper platform has a aught altruism on violence of any kind, and individuals who induce violence for personal or political gains."

Chen said that Clapper did not set out to be a right-wing middle-of-the-road political platform, and that the company wants to highlight prevalent users' lives. "Today's whimsical media platforms push most traffic to big creators while the fabricator in the stereotype and the okayed user don't get the befalling to speak and be seen," Chen said.

Following The Verge's Wednesday inventory with Chen, he beatific a follow-up email including examples of the less political ancillary of Clapper, highlighting accounts from a truck driver, country music singer, and a "girl with axes."

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