Social media platform Parler filed a lawsuit against Amazon on Monday after its web services were terminated by Amazon following the Capitol Hill riots.
Parler alleges that it is being discriminated against because it is a direct competitor to Twitter.
“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,” stated Parler in its court filing.
“AWS’s decision to effectively terminate Parler’s account is apparently motivated by political animus,” alleged Parler. “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.”
“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,” stated Parler. “The exodus was so large that the next day, yesterday, Parler became the number one free app downloaded from Apple’s App Store.”
Parler is currently offline due to Amazon’s decision to suspend Parler from its cloud based hosting service AWS.
Parler’s CEO John Matze urged users to stick with his platform during an interview on “Mornings with Maria.”
“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,” claimed Matze. “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.”
Gab, a direct competitor to Parler, which experienced similar deplatforming attempts after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, posted on Twitter that they have experienced a surge in growth since President Trump was banned.
“Gab gained more users in the past 2 days than we did in our first two years of existing,” said Gab on Twitter. “That’s why you never give up. Keep building, keep forging ahead. Keep the faith. Even when all hope seems lost.
Parler is seeking a temporary restraining order to keep Amazon Web Services from shutting down its servers. The lawsuit alleges that Amazon is violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. Apple and Google have banned Parler from its app stores.
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