Parler plans to sue Amazon, ask federal judge to reinstate service

Social media service Parler has announced that it is suing Amazon after the company removed Parler from its AWS platform, effectively causing the service to shut down indefinitely.

According to multiple reports, the company intends to sue Amazon for antitrust violations, breach of contract, and unlawful business interference. Parler also intends to ask for an injunction that would require Amazon to reinstate the service during the pendency of the litigation.

After Apple and Google removed Parler from their application stores this weekend due to Parler's failure to adopt content moderation policies that satisfied the tech giants, Amazon followed suit and removed Parler from its web hosting services, a move that took effect Monday morning. Any user who currently attempts to access Parler will now get an error message.

Parler CEO John Matze has condemned any and all users who have used his service for violent purposes and has maintained that his site already has policies that prohibit people from using Parler to advocate for or coordinate violent attacks. However, he maintains, the massive influx of new users over the last few weeks has left his staff scrambling to implement those policies effectively.

In a statement released Sunday night, Parler complained, "Parler is not a surveillance app, so we can't just write a few algorithms that will quickly locate 100% of objectionable content, especially during periods of rapid growth."

Speaking on Fox Business on Monday morning, Matze said, "I'm not interested in seeing our platform or any other platform frankly used as a tool for violence and spreading violence ... We would never condone it, we have a lot of things in place to stop it."

If Parler's lawsuit is unsuccessful, it is unclear when the service might be back online. As Matze noted in one of his final posts on the platform, all other web hosting companies that are large enough to handle the Parler service have also "closed their doors" to the social media service.