Parler, the social media platform where hundreds of thousands of conservatives transitioned to over the past several months, has filed a lawsuit Monday against Amazon following their Web Services suspension of Parler from its cloud hosting service according to Fox News.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) decision came on the heels of Google and Apple suspending Parler’s app from their mobile stores, citing Parler‘s need to present a plan to monitor it’s posts stating they allowed “egregious content” posted by users related to the deadly riot at the Capitol on January 6.
Parler is seeking a temporary restraining to be force AWS to put them back online, claiming Amazon Web Services is violating the Sherman Antitrust Act.
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“AWS’s decision to effectively terminate Parler’s account is apparently motivated by political animus,” Parler states in its filing. “AWS is violating Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act in combination with Defendant Twitter. AWS is also breaching it[s] contract with Parler, which requires AWS to provide Parler with a thirty-day notice before terminating service, rather than the less than thirty-hour notice AWS actually provided. Finally, AWS is committing intentional interference with prospective economic advantage given the millions of users expected to sign up in the near future.”
Parler also claims that it is being discriminated against due to its direct competition with Twitter.
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“Last month, Defendant Amazon Web Services, Inc. (“AWS”) and the popular social media platform Twitter signed a multi-year deal so that AWS could support the daily delivery of millions of tweets. AWS currently provides that same service to Parler, a conservative microblogging alternative and competitor to Twitter,” the filing states.
“When Twitter announced two evenings ago that it was permanently banning President Trump from its platform, conservative users began to flee Twitter en masse for Parler. The exodus was so large that the next day, yesterday, Parler became the number one free app downloaded from Apple’s App Store.”
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Despite being the number one downloaded app on Apple, Google, Apple and Amazon all went ahead and pulled the plug. Parler went dark Monday morning after AWS suspended Parler from its cloud hosting service.
In an interview on Fox News “Mornings with Maria” Monday, CEO John Matze encouraged users to “hold on and come back” while they figure out their next step.
“Nobody has presented any credible piece of information or evidence that, you know, there is anything problems on Parler that don’t exist on other platforms,” Matze said. “This really is a double standard. … We see all sorts of nasty threatening content on Twitter, much more of it actually, in our opinion, and, actually, a lot of content that’s deleted from Parler still remains on Twitter to this day in the form of screenshots. So I don’t understand, you know, what this is really about. Because it is not about holding everybody to account equally. It is about giving preferential treatment to certain people.”
Hopefully the case will be put before a judge who believes in free speech and is against monopolies bullying their competition because they do not agree with their narrative.
