President Donald Trump’s supporters swarmed to join Parler after Trump was kicked off Twitter and Facebook. However, as of Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific time, Parler’s website will be shut down until it can find a new web hosting provider.
Henderson, Nevada-based Parler is a microblogging and social networking service which was founded by John Matze, Jr., Jared Thomson, and Rebekah Mercer in 2018. As of November 2020, the social media platform had about 10 million users.
Parler is largely unmoderated, and bills itself as “the world’s premier free speech platform.” The site has attracted conspiracy theorists, hate group members, and right-wing activists who have openly incited violence. Its latest threads have called for the execution of Vice-president Mike Pence.
After receiving complaints that Parler was used to coordinate the 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol, Apple informed Parler executives on January 8, 2021, that its mobile app would be removed from the App Store within 24 hours if Parler did not improve its moderation policy.
In the meantime, Parler was removed from the Google Play Store on January 8. The following day, the app was removed from the Apple store, according to NPR.org.
On January 9, Parler was informed by Amazon that it would suspend Parler from its cloud hosting service, Amazon Web Services (AWS) the next day, according to BuzzFeed News, who broke the story.
BuzzFeed News writes that people used Parler: “to stoke fear, spread hate, and coordinate the insurrection at the Capitol building on Wednesday. The app has recently been overrun with death threats, celebrations of violence, and posts encouraging “Patriots” to march on Washington, DC with weapons on January 19, the day before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden.”
In an email from the AWS Trust and Safety team sent to Parler, AWS writes: “Recently, we’ve seen a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms,” the email reads. “It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service.”
After Amazon booted Parler from its AWS cloud-hosting service, Parler CEO, ohn Matze said in a post on his platform that Parler could be off the Internet for as long as a week while “we rebuild from scratch,” reports CTV News Canada.
