Olympia, WA – A federal lawsuit filed by Parler against Amazon on Monday claimed that over an hour before Amazon told Parler that their hosting was being canceled, Amazon leaked the cancelation notice to the media.
Parler is a free speech social media network which was shut down by Amazon on Sunday night when Amazon Web Services pulled their server hosting.
The move comes after both Apple and Google removed the Parler app from their app stores for not censoring speech on the platform.
In Parler’s lawsuit against Amazon, they claimed that Amazon canceled their account due to political animus and to protect Twitter after Amazon had just secured a contract to handle Twitter’s hosting.
“When Twitter announced two evenings ago that it was permanently banning President Trump from its platform, conservative users began to flee Twitter en masse for Parler,” the lawsuit says. “The exodus was so large that the next day, yesterday, Parler became the number one free app downloaded from Apple’s App Store.”
“Yet last evening, AWS announced that it would suspend Parler’s account effective Sunday, January 10th, at 11:59 PM PST,” Parler’s lawsuit says. “And it stated the reason for the suspension was that AWS was not confident Parler could properly police its platform regarding content that encourages or incites violence against others. However, Friday night one of the top trending tweets on Twitter was ‘Hang Mike Pence.’ But AWS has no plans nor has it made any threats to suspend Twitter’s account.”
In the lawsuit, Parler noted that BuzzFeed reported on Amazon pulling their services from Parler at 6:07 p.m. Buzzfeed had a copy of Parler’s cancelation notice, but Parler didn’t even receive the letter until 7:19 p.m.
It’s not clear if the release of the letter to BuzzFeed was authorized by Amazon.
Parler accused Amazon of breaching its contract by not providing the required 30-day notice, and intentionally interfering with their business.
And Parler is seeking a temporary restraining order for Amazon to restore its hosting, as well as unspecified damages to be granted at a trial.
Parler has been completely offline since Amazon pulled their hosting Sunday night.
Holly Matkin
Sandy Malone