‘It could be never’: Parler CEO says site may not recover after ‘catastrophic’ Big Tech purge as legal battle with Amazon rages on

14 Jan, 2021 02:29

Social media site Parler may never come back online after Amazon dropped the conservative-friendly platform from its servers, its CEO said, as the company insists in court that its termination was motivated by “political animus.”

Parler CEO John Matze told Reuters on Wednesday that the website’s future is in limbo after a cascade of online vendors rushed to distance themselves from the platform in the wake of an eruption of violence at the US Capitol last week, saying he doesn’t know if it will ever bounce back.

“It could be never. We don’t know yet,” he said.

"It’s hard to keep track of how many people are telling us that we can no longer do business with them."

Amazon Web Services ended its relationship with Parler last weekend, arguing the company had allowed “violent” user content to proliferate and was too lax about policing posts in light of the Capitol riot, effectively shutting down the site altogether. At the time of writing, Parler remains offline.

Matze has also argued that Parler fell victim to a “coordinated attack,” pointing to the fact that both Google and Apple moved to boot the site off their app platforms within a 24-hour period, immediately followed by Amazon’s full termination of service on Sunday. Payment processors American Express and Stripe have also ended their dealings with Parler, as have chat apps Slack and Twilio.

On Monday, Parler took Amazon to court, accusing the web giant of breach of contract, defamation and antitrust violations, insisting its actions were motivated by “political animus” and a desire to bolster a weather client, Twitter, by shutting down a competing service.

Amazon responded to the allegations in its own court filing on Tuesday, maintaining that it had “notified Parler repeatedly that its content violated the parties’ agreement,” but the company was “both unwilling and unable” to address the problem.

“[Amazon] was well within its rights to suspend Parler immediately for those failures,” it said, adding that in the period leading up to Parler’s termination, CEO Matze “reported that Parler had a backlog of 26,000 reports of content that violated its community standards and remained on its service.”…

More: https://www.rt.com/usa/512458-parler-ceo-recover-amazon/