- President Donald Trump has considered creating an account on Parler under the pseudonym ‘Person X’, CEO John Matze said on Wednesday.
- Matze argued in court that Parler’s web host, Amazon Web Services, had been aware of this since at least October and that the possibility that Trump would join Parler was part of the reason why AWS severed ties with the network on Monday.
- “There is no merit to these allegations,” an Amazon spokesman told Insider.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
President Donald Trump has considered creating an account on Parler, the social media app popular with his followers, under the pseudonym ‘Person X’, Parler CEO John Matze said in a court statement on Wednesday .
Matze claims that Amazon Web Services was aware of these plans and ended its contract with Parler this week to deny Trump a further presence on social media.
AWS who cut off Parler on Monday took the app on the right track and Matze believes it can never come back.
AWS said Parler “poses a very big risk to public safety”, and Google and Apple have ruled out the app in their app stores. Parler has become a haven for far-right activities and misinformation due to the lax attitude towards moderating the content, and some users called for further violence during the January 6 Capitol riots.
Matze’s submission Wednesday came after social media network hit AWS with an antitrust lawsuit. The documentation disputes Amazon’s allegations that it has repeatedly warned Parler about suspending the platform’s contract due to violent content.
In Wednesday’s submission, Matze said an AWS representative assigned to Parler had been aware at least since October that Trump was thinking of creating an account on the platform. The representative was in regular contact with Matze about this, he added, arguing that the person should therefore also have known that it would bring a surge of Trump’s supporters to Parler.
“[Retracted], who is a Joe Biden supporter, was the AWS representative who assigned AWS to me, and has been aware since at least October 11, 2020 that Trump is considering moving to Parler under the pseudonym ‘Person X’ ‘, Matze wrote.
The representative contacted him regularly about this, Matze said, adding: “AWS knew that there was a possibility that Trump could get a Parler account, which would likely bring an increase in followers to the Parler platform.”
Matze said that “based on my interaction with AWS staff during this period, I believe that AWS’s decision to terminate service to Parler was not based on concerns expressed about Parler’s compliance with the AWS agreement, but partly on a will to President Trump platform on any major social media service. “
He added: “AWS had inside and confidential knowledge of Parler about when and if he would join.”
There is ‘no merit’ to Matze’s allegations that AWS Parler looted to stop Trump from getting a bill, an Amazon spokesman told Insider, explaining that it provided technology and services to customers across the political spectrum. offer.
Rather, it made the move because of the content on the site that encourages and incites violence, Amazon said.
“We have disclosed our concerns to Parler over a number of weeks and during that time we have seen a significant increase in this type of dangerous content, not a decrease, which led to our services being suspended on Sunday night,” he said said.
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Since the January 6 uprising at the Capitol, numerous social media outlets, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Snapchat, have closed or permanently banned Trump’s accounts, making it likely that Trump would turn to Parler as an alternative.
Matze said in the submission that AWS expressed concern about its agreement with Parler, only after Twitter announced that it was barring Trump from its platform.
In the documentation, Matze claims that Amazon only expressed concern about Parler’s content moderation system until January 8. Amazon said Tuesday that it has issued repeated warnings since mid-November and that Parler has refused to remove more than 100 examples of violence. content, including death threats.
Matze also said Parler was dropped by the workplace messaging service Slack, making it difficult for Parler employees to monitor its contents.
“Losing Slack makes it extremely difficult to enforce our terms of service effectively with our nearly 600 volunteer and paid jurors,” he wrote.