Social media site Parler is suing Amazon. The tech giant suspended its cloud services following the attack on the US Capitol last Wednesday.
Parler is a site popular among conservatives and Trump supporters. It is under fire for refusing to join Facebook and Twitter’s efforts to scrub conservative content from the Internet.
Without Amazon’s cloud services, Parler had to go offline.
In a lawsuit filed Monday, Parler is suing Amazon for allegedly breaching its contract with the app and violating the Sherman Antitrust Act.
Amazon’s contract with Parler requires the web host to provide a 30-day notice before services are terminated. But it gave Parler just a 30-hour notice last week. And its decision to boot Parler from the Internet is to reduce competition with Twitter. It is a site that depends on Amazon’s cloud services to function.
“AWS is committing intentional interference with prospective economic advantage given the millions of users expected to sign up in the near future,” reads the suit. “When Twitter announced two evenings ago that it was permanently banning President Trump from its platform, conservative users began to flee Twitter en mass 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.”
Apple and Google backed Amazon’s decision by removing Parler from their app stores.
Speaking with Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, Parler CEO John Matze accused the tech companies of working together to remove competition and assured his users the app would be online soon.
“This really is a double standard,” said Matze. “We see all sorts of nasty threatening content on Twitter…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.”
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