Parler Appears To Have Gone Dark Following Amazon De-Hosting Announcement

Parler appears to have gone offline early Monday morning, just after midnight on the West Coast, reports The New York Times.

Late Saturday, Amazon announced that it would remove the controversial right-wing social platform from its cloud hosting service, Amazon Web Services, by 11:59 pm Pacific time on Sunday, because of repeated violations of the platform’s rules.

Prior to Amazon’s announcement, both Apple and Google removed Parler from their app stores, citing the platform’s failure to stem user posts encouraging violence.

As Facebook and Twitter have become somewhat tougher about policing calls for violence and dangerous conspiracy theories —including the lie that Joe Biden did not fairly win the national election — Parler has become the de facto platform for many Trump supporters.

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On Sunday, Parler’s CEO John Matze, told the Times that he was “racing to save the data of Parler’s roughly 15 million users from Amazon’s computers. He was also calling company after company to find one willing to support Parler with hundreds of computer servers.”

In a post late Saturday, Matze, who has claimed that Parler does not condone or accept violence, accused Amazon, Google and Apple of working together to “try and ensure they don’t have competition.”

He repeated his claim that Parler is dedicated to “free speech and free information” and vowed that it would be back, although it would likely shut down “for up to a week as we rebuild from scratch.”

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