Right-wing app Parler booted off internet over ties to Capitol siege
The conservative-friendly social network Parler was booted off the internet Monday over ties to last week’s siege on the U.S. Capitol, but not before digital activists made off with an archive of its posts, including any that might have helped organize or document the riot.
Amazon kicked Parler off its web-hosting service, and the social media app promptly sued to get back online, telling a federal judge that the tech giant had breached its contract and abused its market power.
It was a roller coaster of activity for Parler, a 2-yearold magnet for the far right that welcomed a surge of new users and became the No. 1 free app on iPhones late last week, after Facebook, Twitter and other mainstream social media platforms silenced President Donald Trump’s accounts over comments that seemed to incite Wednesday’s violent insurrection.
The wave of Trump followers flocking to the service was short-lived. Google yanked Parler’s smartphone app from its app store Friday for allowing postings that seek “to incite ongoing violence in the U.S.”
Apple followed suit on Saturday after giving Parler a day to address complaints it was being used to “plan and facilitate yet further illegal and dangerous activities.” It was later joined by Amazon Web Services, the leading provider of cloud computing infrastructure, which informed Parler it would need to look for a new web-hosting service after Sunday.
Parler CEO John Matze decried the punishments as “a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the marketplace.”
Parler’s lawsuit in a Seattlebased federal court makes the argument that Amazon violated antitrust laws to harm Parler and help Twitter. It also alleges Amazon breached its contract by not giving 30 days of notice before terminating Parler’s account. Amazon and Parler did not return requests for comment about the dispute Monday.
Matze has signaled there is little chance of getting Parler back online anytime soon after “every vendor, from text message services, to e-mail providers, to our lawyers all ditched us too on the same day,” he told Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”
Meanwhile, a group of digital “hactivists” salvaged much of what happened on Parler before it went offline and said they plan to put it into a public archive.
The effort to download and archive posts, including image files that can be tied to geographic locations, has instilled some fear in Parler users, though law enforcement might have been able to access the data anyway, and experts said the archive does not include information that was not publicly accessible. The cache of data is not yet easily readable by nonexperts.
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