Parler Sues Amazon For Yanking Its Web-Hosting Services

Parler is suing Amazon, claiming it's being "targeted for political reasons."

Just after midnight on Monday, Amazon kicked off Parler from its cloud services citing that they weren't "confident in its ability to monitor content on its platform."

Parler wants a temporary restraining order to block Amazon from shutting down their account.

Doing so is the equivalent of pulling the plug on a hospital patient on life support. It will kill Parler's business — at the very time it is set to skyrocket

According to an Amazon spokesperson, there is "no merit to these claims."

AWS provides technology and services to customers across the political spectrum, and we respect Parler's right to determine for itself what content it will allow. However, it is clear that there is significant content on Parler that encourages and incites violence against others, and that Parler is unable or unwilling to promptly identify and remove this content, which is a violation of our terms of service. We made our concerns known to Parler over a number of weeks and during that time we saw a significant increase in this type of dangerous content, not a decrease, which led to our suspension of their services Sunday evening

The conservative platform exploded immediately after the November election. At the time, people saw Parler as an alternative for Facebook, as the social media giant focused on fact-checking and blocking misinformation. The platform saw another chance at spiking as President Trump was banned from just about every mainstream social media service after the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol.

But then on Friday, Google pulled Parler from its app store for "allowing postings that seek to incite ongoing violence in the U.S." Next came Apple on Saturday, yanking Parler from their app store after giving them 24 hours to address complaints that it was being used to "plan and facilitate yet further illegal and dangerous activities."

Amazon was the next domino to fall, letting Parler know they would need to find a new web-hosting service by midnight on Sunday.

It reminded Parler in a letter, first reported by Buzzfeed, that it had informed it in the past few weeks of 98 examples of posts "that clearly encourage and incite violence" and said the platform "poses a very real risk to public safety."

Parler head honcho John Matze believes the punishments are unfair.

a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the marketplace. We were too successful too fast. Every vendor, from text message services to e-mail providers, to our lawyers all ditched us too on the same day

Matze went onto say as Parler tries to rebuild from scratch, his team is having "a lot of trouble" due to vendors refusing to work with them.

every vendor we talk to says they won't work with us, because, if Apple doesn't approve and Google doesn't approve, they won't.

As of right now, Parler has lost access to the Google and Apple app stores. That means they don't have access to hundreds of millions of smartphones "severely limiting Parler's reach."

In the meantime, other sites like Gab.com are doing all they can to benefit from Parler being sidelined with troubles. According to CBS, "Gab posted on Monday that it had "gained more users in the past 2 days than we did in our first two years of existing."

Read the full story via CBS here.