The social network Parler, an increasingly popular forum for the far right, is being told by Amazon that its web hosting will be suspended on Sunday, a move that will ensure everything but that it is taken offline.
The action is the latest attempt by a technology company to end incitement to violence following Wednesday’s hooliganism in Washington by a pro-Trump mob. Apple and Google have suspended Parler from their respective app stores for the past 24 hours, while Twitter permanently suspended President Donald Trump’s account on Friday.
Unless Parler can find an alternative hosting company willing to take over its business, the site will no longer be able to operate after 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time Sunday.
The actions against Trump and Parler have heightened the debate over the powers of tech companies, as critics accuse them of wanting to regulate speech online and censor conservative voices.
Parler has become an increasingly popular alternative to Twitter for conservatives who are angry at what they see as the larger social media company’s liberal bias. But it was popular with right-wing activists, who critics say used it as a platform to incite violence, including calls to assassinate Vice President Mike Pence.
The trust and security team at AWS’s cloud division, AWS, wrote in a letter to Parler’s chief executive Amy Peikoff that although it provided technology to those with political views across the spectrum, it was “upset about repeated violations” of his terms of service. with respect to moderation.
“We cannot provide services to a customer who cannot effectively identify and remove content that encourages or incites violence against others,” reads the letter, first obtained by BuzzFeed News and verified by the Financial Times.
The letter states that AWS has been in contact with the controversial forum for several weeks, bringing to its attention 98 cases of posts “clearly encouraging and inciting violence”.
An Amazon spokesman did not comment further.
Upon removing Parler, Apple explained that it respects divergent views, but that there is no place on our platform for threats of violence and illegal activity.
Parler, a self-described “unbiased social media network” that claims to advocate “free speech”, has become the number one most downloaded in Apple’s App Store after Twitter banned Trump’s personal account on Friday.
In response, the outgoing president issued a statement saying he had “negotiated with various other areas” and was looking at the possibility of “expanding our own platform in the near future.”
Parler CEO John Matze, who posted on the website, said the company would build ‘from scratch’ and find a new host. He said the site would be offline for “up to a week”.
He suggested the move was a “coordinated attack by technology giants to destroy competition in the market”.
Dina Srinivasan, an antitrust scientist whose contribution to the call to break Facebook, said it was a “policeman” for Parler to bring about collusion.
“To suggest that Amazon, Google and Apple coordinated an attack to silence Parler and Trump is ridiculous,” she said. “It is completely rational for any firm to act in the same way.”
The decisive steps by the technology giants suggest that any new platform may have a challenging time becoming mainstream.
“U.S. businesses do not want to be involved in an uprising,” Ms Srinivasan said.