Parler is likely to return at some point, but Amazon has ensured that the Donald Trump-backed social media platform disappears at least temporarily.
Amazon told Parler on Saturday that the lax approach to content moderation is a violation of terms of service, Buzzfeed reported. As a result, Parler will be officially suspended from Amazon’s web hosting services from Monday around midnight Pacific Time. The move will effectively take the site offline.
Parler in particular served as one of the grounds for the pro-Trump activities in Washington, DC that led to a riot and failed uprising at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. In the days that followed, Google and then Apple took the step to remove the social networking app from their respective app stores.
Both removal of the app store are the result of the same issue: issues with Parler’s content restriction policy. Unlike Twitter, which is modeled on the pro-Trump network, Parler follows a largely practical approach to policing user behavior. It has created a welcoming environment for Trump supporters who want to follow the president’s lead to sow chaos and undermine American democracy.
Amazon’s decision has more of a direct impact on Parler than removing the app store. There are many solutions for Android users who want an app that is not available in the Google Play Store. And Apple, which gave Parler a 24-hour window to get the content mode together, accidentally led to a situation where the app topped the App Store’s free app charts.
A suspension on web hosting, on the other hand, effectively makes Parler inaccessible until he can live in a new home. When the similarly problematic 8chan message board lost its host provider in August 2019, it took a few months before the website could link online again. However, it may be too much to hope for the same outcome here.
In the case of 8chan, the web host that suspended the site – Epik – was already a kind of last stop, as Epik is known for helping other sites get back online after being shut down due to hateful behavior. But in that case, 8chan’s connections to the devastating mass shootings in 2019 in El Paso and Dayton were too much for even Epik to disappear, almost certainly because of possible legal liability.
However, Parler is not there yet. Epik is the web host to which such a network could turn after mainstream options like AWS closed the door for continued service. But Parler’s commitment to the DC riot, which is still very fresh, coupled with ongoing reports that it is still an active scene for planning malicious behavior, could keep the site offline until after the election of President Joe Biden on January 20th.
Given the reports that additional violent action could come before the inauguration – as Twitter made clear when it suspended Trump’s account on Friday – a shutdown by Parler lasting longer than Jan. 20 could only help ward off the threat . The network’s ties to the DC riot should also provide a possible new web host pause until the site can establish a semblance of thoughtful and effective content modification.