The fastest growing social media network, Parler, has been under attack by monopolies that should never have been allowed to gain this much control in their spaces. The good news is—their CEO is fighting back!
Google, a company that allegedly created a “blacklist” of mostly conservatives (our website made the list), warned Parler to create a censorship policy for its users, or they would pull their app from the Google Play store. Shortly after Google’s warning, Apple followed suit, threatening to remove the Parler app from their app store if they didn’t implement a censorship policy within 24 hours. Parler CEO John Matze refused to bow down to the big tech oligarchs. Almost immediately after Apple’s announcement, Amazon, the world’s biggest online seller, whose business has thrived during the government-mandated lockdowns, threatened to remove Parler’s website from their servers unless they agreed to create a censorship policy.
Like President Trump, Parler CEO John Matze is a fighter, and he is refusing to back down.
Before Amazon removed Parler from their servers, Matze shared updates with users on his extremely popular social media platform.
In his first message to Parler users, Matze explained that Parler is “the closest thing to competition that Facebook or Twitter have seen in many years.” He also said he believes that Google and Apple “worked together to try and ensure they don’t have any competition.” Matze assured everyone, “They will NOT win!” reminding us that Parler is “the world’s last hope for free speech and free information.”
Matze invited Parler users to check back on Tuesday, telling them they expect to be fully operational by noon on Monday.
Today, after Amazon remove Parler from their cloud servers, John Matze shared an update, saying they will likely be down longer than expected. He explained, “This is not due to software restrictions–we have our software and everyone’s data ready to go. Rather, it’s that Amazon’s, Google’s and Apple’s statements to the press about dropping our access has caused most of our other vendors to drop their support for us as well.” He added, “most people with enough servers to host us have shut their doors to us.” Matze said they would update everyone when they are back up online.
Never underestimate the power of monopolies…
Parler has now filed a lawsuit against Amazon Inc., saying their decision to remove the free speech company from their servers was politically motivated.
WSJ reports – In a complaint filed Monday in Seattle federal court, Parler alleged that Amazon Web Services kicked the company off its cloud servers for political and anti-competitive reasons.
“AWS’s decision to effectively terminate Parler’s account is apparently motivated by political animus. It is also apparently designed to reduce competition in the microblogging services market to the benefit of Twitter, ” according to the complaint, which also accused Amazon of breaching a contract between the parties.
Amazon said Saturday that it would cut off Parler because it wasn’t confident in its ability to sufficiently police content on its platform that incites violence. The company said while it would no longer provide web services to Parler after Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific time, it would preserve the platform’s data and help it migrate to different servers.
In its complaint, Parler also accused Amazon of applying a double standard than with other platforms, noting that Twitter had recently signed a multi-year web-hosting deal with the company.
