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The creators of the social network Parler sued Amazon for ending a web hosting deal after last week’s riot in the US Capitol. Parler claims that Amazon Web Services broke ties to prevent Parler from competing with the largest social platform Twitter, and is asking a court to prevent Amazon from closing his account, arguing that a prolonged shutdown would be like “disconnecting a patient from the hospital on life support. “
Parler presents himself as a more permissive alternative to Facebook and Twitter, particularly as those sites have cracked down on President Donald Trump and his supporters for trying to violently overturn the results of the US elections. That stance has garnered backlash from digital infrastructure companies. Apple and Google removed the Parler app from their stores, limiting its reach. Amazon dealt an even more fatal blow when it kicked Parler out of AWS, bringing down the site entirely.
The lawsuit sheds some light on Amazon’s rationale for banning Parler. In an email, Amazon’s moderation team says it is “concerned” about the repeated policy violations. The email cites 98 posts inciting violence. Includes screenshots of a call to hang up “traitors” as well as an exhortation to “begin to systematically murder [sic]Liberal leaders, supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement and others in January, with a note that “I already have a newsworthy event planned.” Amazon said publicly that it “cannot provide services to a customer who cannot effectively identify and remove content that encourages or incites violence against others.”
AWS is the world’s largest cloud service provider, controlling about a third of the market, followed by competitors like Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Parler maintains that being kicked out of AWS was a “death sentence” for the site, as it has been unable to find another host. And he claims that Amazon made the call to protect Twitter, as the two companies signed a multi-year deal for web services last year. He also says it was banned for “political animosity.”
Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union have questioned the power of infrastructure providers to suppress speech online. “It is understandable that no company wants to associate itself with the disgusting speech that is now rampant,” said ACLU attorney Ben Wizner. saying New York Times reporter Davey Alba. However, “there will be times when a great majority of people will want to reject a speech that is really important. So I think we should encourage, in a broad sense, companies like Amazon to embrace the principles of neutrality. “
However, as a private company, Amazon has ample legal leeway to cut customers. Nor is it necessarily responsible for Parler’s difficulty in finding a new host. While the lawsuit says AWS’s public statements about restraint have “made Parler an outcast,” activists were already pressuring companies to cut ties with the site.
Parler’s lawsuit echoes a similar complaint from Gab, another social network favored by far-right figures. Gab sued Google in 2017 for removing it from the Play Store, claiming it constituted anti-competitive behavior. However, he dropped the lawsuit after Google allowed him to resubmit the app for review.
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