Right-wing friendly Parler again sues Amazon

SEATTLE — Parler, the rightwing friendly social network that was forced offline after supporters of then-president Donald Trump attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, has filed a new lawsuit against Amazon.

Amazon Web Services, the Seattle tech giant’s cloud-computing division, stopped working with Parler in January over what Amazon said was Parler’s inability to moderate violent content, the kind that spurred supporters of Trump.

Parler went back online two weeks ago, hosted by Skysilk, a Los Angeles-based cloud-computing outfit.

The Seattle Times reports that Parler’s new lawsuit, filed late Tuesday in King County Superior Court, alleges contractual offenses, as well as deceptive and unfair trade practices and defamation.

Parler is seeking unspecified monetary damages from Amazon.

Its original lawsuit, filed in January in Seattle’s federal district court, was billed primarily as an antitrust action, accusing Amazon of collaborating with Twitter to sink Parler’s business. Parler voluntarily dismissed that suit late Tuesday, an hour before a courtimposed deadline to file an amended complaint in the case.

Parler has said that Amazon’s primary motivation in pulling the plug on its services was in support of Twitter, a new AWS client.

Amazon’s decision to cut ties with Parler temporarily wiped the social network from the web, costing it hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising revenue, the new suit contends. Moreover, Amazon’s claims that Parler was “unwilling or unable” to remove problematic content were false, Parler said in its new suit, and had the effect of defaming the website to the extent that other large cloud-computing providers have been unwilling to work with it.

Parler has also argued in its new suit that the problematic content Amazon presented as a rationale for taking it off the web represented only a fraction of all posts and comments on Parler.

“There is no merit to these claims,” an AWS spokesperson said in a statement. “As shown by the evidence in Parler’s federal lawsuit, it was clear that there was significant content on Parler that encouraged and incited violence against others, which is a violation of our terms of service.”