Conservative social networking Parler sues Amazon above web shutdown
12 January, 2021
The social platform Parler sued Amazon on Monday (Jan 11) following the tech giant's web division forced the conservative-favoured network offline for failing woefully to rein in incitements to violence.
Nevada-founded Parler asked a federal government court for a restraining order to block Amazon Web Services (AWS) from cutting off usage of Internet servers.
The suit comes amid a wave of action by online giants blocking usage of President Donald Trump's supporters in the wake of previous week's USA Capitol invasion and purported plans for new violent demonstrations, especially on the day President-elect Joe Biden is because of take office.
Twitter announced on Mon that it had suspended "a lot more than 70,000" accounts from the QAnon conspiracy theory found in light of last Wednesday's attack, where five people died.
The lawsuit said Parler was due to go dark later on Monday, but web trackers said it already was offline earlier in the day and had failed to discover a new hosting service.
Shutting down the servers will be "the same as pulling the plug upon a hospital patient on life support", the lawsuit said. "It'll kill Parler's business - at the time it is set to skyrocket."
Parler alleged Amazon was first violating antitrust regulations and acting to greatly help sociable rival Twitter, which also offers banned Trump for terminology that could incite violence.
"AWS's decision to effectively terminate Parler's consideration is apparently motivated by political animus. It is also apparently designed to lessen competition in the microblogging services market to the benefit of Twitter," the complaint explained.
Amazon said there is "no merit" to the lawsuit.
"We respect Parler's to determine for itself what content it'll allow," an AWS spokesperson said.
"However, it is clear that there surely is significant content material on Parler that encourages and incites violence against others, and that Parler cannot or unwilling to promptly identify and remove this content, which is a violation of our terms of service."
Amazon said it turned out in touch with Parler "over several weeks" and that during that time "we found a significant increase in this sort of dangerous content, not a decrease, which resulted in our suspension of their companies Sunday evening".
"WAR ON No cost SPEECH"
In some posts on Parler before the site went down, CEO John Matze accused the tech giants of a "war on free speech".
Matze also denied allegations that it permits violent content.
"Our team worked hard to make a strong set of community suggestions, which expressly forbids content which incites or threatens violence, or different activity which breaks regulations," he said found in a statement.
But he also maintained that it is problematic to police all articles because "Parler isn't a surveillance app, as a result we can not just write a handful of algorithms which will quickly locate 100 % of objectionable content".
The lawsuit may be the most recent twist in a tussle between online operators and supporters of the president that hit a fresh phase following the siege of the US Capitol last week.
Twitter and Facebook each suspended Trump's account, while online payment support Stripe said it would give up handling transactions on Trump's website following previous week's assault.
Twitter also said that it had begun purging QAnon-linked accounts last Friday, permanently suspending "a lot more than 70,000 accounts ... with many instances of an individual individual operating various accounts".
"These accounts were involved found in sharing harmful QAnon-associated articles at level and were primarily dedicated to the propagation of the conspiracy theory across the provider," Twitter said found in a blog post.
The far-right QAnon conspiracy theory claims Trump is waging a secret war against a worldwide liberal cult of Satan-worshipping paedophiles.
Twitter said its decision to suspend Trump's accounts and others also considered that plans for extra armed protests have already been proliferating on and off the service, including a proposed second strike on the US Capitol and status capitol properties on Jan 17.
Parler, which launched in 2018, operates much like Twitter, with profiles to check out and "parleys" instead of tweets.
In its start, the program attracted a crowd of ultraconservative and also extreme-right users. But more recently, it has registered many more traditional Republican voices.
Trump supporters expressed outrage at the news headlines the platform had been taken down.
Ahead of the shutdown, the president's boy Donald Trump Jr complained that "big tech offers totally eliminated the idea of free speech in America".
The platform drew fierce criticism in 2018 when investigators found that the shooter who killed 11 persons in an attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue had earlier posted anti-Semitic messages on the site.
Source: www.channelnewsasia.com
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