Parler Sues Amazon Over Web Shutdown, Alleges Political Animus

(Reuters) – Parler LLC, a social media platform favored by many supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump, sued Amazon.com Inc on Monday, accusing it of making an illegal, politically motivated decision to shut it down to benefit Twitter Inc.

In an antitrust complaint filed with the U.S. District Court in Seattle, Parler said Amazon delivered a “death blow” by abruptly cutting off Web-hosting services on Sunday night, soon after Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google removed the Parler app from their own app stores.

Parler accused Amazon Web Services of hypocrisy for expressing a lack of confidence it could properly police its platform, including by removing content encouraging violence.

It said Amazon did this despite making no threats to suspend Twitter, where a recent top-trending tweet demanded to “Hang Mike Pence,” the U.S. vice president.

“AWS false claims have made Parler a pariah,” and the web services cutoff “is the equivalent of pulling the plug on a hospital patient on life support,” the complaint said.

Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Twitter declined to comment. Parler was not immediately available for comment.

Parler wants a court order requiring Amazon to reinstate its account and provide services it had contracted for.

It is also seeking triple damages, saying it had over 12 million users and stood to lose millions more as conservatives encourage their Twitter followers to switch to Parler.

Twitter permanently suspended Trump’s personal account, @realDonaldTrump, on Friday night, citing the “risk of further incitement of violence.”

That suspension came two days after the U.S. Capitol was stormed by a mob of Trump supporters, whose conduct Twitter said Trump appeared to condone.

The Republican president had earlier asked Pence to overturn Democrat Joe Biden’s victory in the Nov. 3 presidential election at a joint session of Congress. Pence did not, and Congress confirmed Biden’s win.

During an interview on “Mornings with Maria” on Monday, CEO John Matze told users to “hold on and come back” as the company figures out how to move forward.

“Nobody has presented any credible piece of information or evidence that, you know, there is anything problems on Parler that don’t exist on other platforms,” Matze said. “This really is a double standard. … We see all sorts of nasty threatening content on Twitter, much more of it actually, in our opinion, and, actually, a lot of content that’s deleted from Parler still remains on Twitter to this day in the form of screenshots. So I don’t understand, you know, what this is really about. Because it is not about holding everybody to account equally. It is about giving preferential treatment to certain people.”

The suit comes as Google and Apple have also taken action against Parler in the wake of a pro-Trump riot at the U.S. Capitol, suspending it from their app store Friday due to a failure to moderate “egregious content” posted by users related to the violent siege last week.