- Parler CEO John Matze said the app could never come online again, Reuters reported.
- The social media site is offline after Amazon Parler started its web hosting service.
- “It can never be,” Matze told Reuters when asked when the app would return. “We do not know yet.”
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Parler’s CEO said the social media app could never come online again.
John Matze, who founded the app in 2018, told Reuters he was not sure if the app would come back after Amazon Parler removed it from its web hosting service. Amazon removed Parler for violating its terms of service, which prohibit content that “encourages or incites violence against others.”
“It can never be,” Matze told Reuters when asked when the app would return. “We do not know yet.”
Conservatives have urged their followers to join Parler after Twitter permanently suspended President Donald Trump’s bill for violating civilian integrity policies following a violent pre-Trump mob storming the U.S. Capitol building. Parler jumped to No. 1 in the App Store before Apple and Google removed the app from their stores.
Read more: EXCLUSIVE: Parler is a Microsoft Office 365 user, and Microsoft employees discuss the ethics of having the far-right social app as a customer
Parler sued Amazon for removing the service, claiming the decision was politically motivated and competitive, as Twitter remained on AWS. Amazon responded quickly to the case, citing more than 100 examples of violent content that violates the firm’s terms of service.
The social media company registered its domain name with Epik, a company known for offering other social networks used by extremist right-wingers, a few days after it was launched from Amazon. Epik said in a Jan. 11 statement that he had “no contact or discussion” with Parler about using the service.
Matze told Reuters he had been in talks with more than one cloud computing service about Parler’s presentation. He told The Blaze, a law firm founded by Glenn Beck, that several providers “at the last second” no longer hosted the app and drove Parler’s “own infrastructure” to re-launch it online gain.
Matze did not name specific services that housed Parler.
“It’s hard to keep track of how many people tell us we can no longer do business with them,” Matze told Reuters.