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NEW YORK: Social platform Parler sued Amazon on Monday (January 11) after the tech giant’s web division forced the conservative network to go offline for failing to monitor incitement to violence.
Parler, based in Nevada, applied to a federal court for a restraining order to prevent Amazon Web Services (AWS) from cutting off access to Internet servers.
The lawsuit comes amid a wave of actions by online giants blocking access to supporters of President Donald Trump in the wake of the invasion of the United States Capitol last week and alleged plans for new violent demonstrations, especially the day President-elect Joe Biden will take office. .
Twitter announced Monday that it had suspended “more than 70,000” accounts linked to the QAnon conspiracy theory in light of last Wednesday’s attack, in which five people were killed.
The lawsuit said Parler was due to shut down late Monday, but web crawlers said he was already offline earlier in the day and hadn’t been able to find a new hosting service.
Turning off the servers would be “the equivalent of disconnecting a patient from the hospital on life support,” the lawsuit says. “It will kill Parler’s business, the very moment it will skyrocket.”
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Parler alleged that Amazon was violating antitrust laws and acting to help its social rival Twitter, which also banned Trump for language that could incite violence.
“AWS’s decision to effectively terminate Parler’s account is apparently motivated by political animosity. It is also apparently designed to reduce competition in the market for microblogging services to the benefit of Twitter,” the complaint says.
Amazon said the lawsuit “had no merit.”
“We respect Parler’s right to determine for himself what content he will allow,” said an AWS spokesperson.
“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 quickly identify and remove this content, which constitutes a violation of our terms of service.” .
Amazon said it had been in contact with Parler “for several weeks” and that during that time “we saw a significant increase in this type of dangerous content, not a decrease, leading to the suspension of its services Sunday night.” .
“WAR AGAINST FREEDOM OF SPEECH”
In a series of posts on Parler before the site’s downfall, CEO John Matze accused the tech giants of a “war on free speech.”
Matze also denied the accusations that it allows violent content.
“Our team worked hard to produce a robust set of community guidelines, which expressly prohibits content that incites or threatens violence or other activity that violates the law,” it said in a statement.
But he also maintained that it is problematic to monitor all content because “Parler is not a surveillance application, so we cannot just write some algorithms that will quickly locate 100 percent of objectionable content.”
The lawsuit is the latest twist in a fight between online operators and supporters of the president that entered a new phase after the siege of the United States Capitol last week.
Twitter and Facebook each suspended Trump’s account, while online payment service Stripe said it would stop handling transactions on Trump’s website after last week’s assault.
Twitter also said it had started purging accounts not linked to QA last Friday, permanently suspending “more than 70,000 accounts … with many cases of a single individual operating multiple accounts.”
“These accounts were dedicated to sharing harmful non-QA content at scale and were primarily dedicated to spreading this conspiracy theory throughout the service,” Twitter said in a blog post.
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The far-right QAnon conspiracy theory claims that Trump is waging a secret war against a global liberal cult of Satan-worshiping pedophiles.
Twitter said its decision to suspend Trump’s account and others also took into account that plans for more armed protests have been proliferating on and off the service, including a proposed second attack on the U.S. Capitol and state capitol buildings. January 17.
Parler, which launched in 2018, operates in much the same way as Twitter, with profiles to follow and “parliaments” rather than tweets.
In its early days, the platform attracted a crowd of ultra-conservative and even far-right users. But more recently, he has signed many more traditional Republican voices.
Trump supporters expressed outrage at the news that the platform was being taken down.
Before the shutdown, the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr, complained that “great technology has totally eliminated the notion of free speech in America.”
The platform drew harsh criticism in 2018 when investigators discovered that the shooter who killed 11 people in an attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue had previously posted anti-Semitic messages on the site.
