Seattle, WA – Amazon has decided to remove the Parler app from their Amazon Web Services hosting, which will take the free speech social media network offline.
The shutdown is expected to happen late Sunday night, according to Fox Business.
Parler CEO John Matze said that the shutdown will take them offline.
“We’re working and scrambling to do this, but it’s not something that you can do really quickly so there’s a good chance that we will be down for a while,” Matze said, according to Fox Business.
The latest blow to Parler comes after the company had their app removed from both Google’s and Apple’s app stores.
Google announced Friday that they had removed the Parler app from their app store for not censoring speech.
Apple announced at the time that they would also remove the app in 24 hours if Parler didn’t implement a plan to moderate content.
Apple followed up by removing the app from their app store.
Parler is a social media network which has promoted itself as the free speech network after other social media companies were criticized for censoring conservative speech.
Unlike other free speech platforms which failed to attract a mainstream userbase, hundreds of thousands of mainstream conservatives have been joining Parler after other networks increased censorship of President Trump.
Blue Lives Matter started utilizing Parler after Facebook cut the reach of all non-mainstream news sites leading up to the presidential election, and started pushing content from left-wing media sites like CNN.
After the riot at the Capitol Wednesday, activists located posts on Parler of random users voicing support for violence.
Yesterday, we asked @AppStore and @GooglePlay to enforce their own Terms of Service on Parler based on the sheer number of violent threats on the platform with #PullParler.
— Sleeping Giants (@slpng_giants) January 8, 2021
Look at the VERY CLEAR terms set by these two app stores below: https://t.co/SpPuSCUxy4
The activists demanded that Apple and Google remove the app from their stores.
Google responded by removing the app Friday.
“In order to protect user safety on Google Play, our longstanding policies require that apps displaying user-generated content have moderation policies and enforcement that removes egregious content like posts that incite violence,” a Google spokesperson said, according to Axios.
With the Parler app removed from the app stores, iPhone and Android users will be unable to download the app.
Anybody who already has the app can continue using it, but Parler will be unable to provide updates and over time the app may stop functioning even if they find another hosting provider.
Holly Matkin
Sandy Malone