Parler Goes Dark After Amazon Cuts Ties For Failing To Remove 'Violent' Content

Updated September 7, 2021

For years, President Donald Trump and the members of his administration have made it an all-but explicit policy to let factual information come second — if it's considered at all — to what their supporters believe.

As CNN reported, this phenomenon is what led former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway to coin the term "alternative facts" to describe then-Press Secretary Sean Spicer's false statements about the size of the crowds that turned out for Trump's inauguration. It's also what led Trump and his allies to assert that the 2020 Presidential Election results were influenced by widespread voter fraud despite offering no substantial evidence demonstrating this.

And since such claims have been identified as contributing to the emergence of the riot that saw people clad in Trump paraphernalia storm the U.S. Capitol, both Trump and his allies are now seeing the number of platforms where they can spread them decrease as a result.

Beginning in 2018, Parler emerged as a self-described "free speech" social networking platform that set itself apart from Twitter and Facebook.

Wikimedia Commons | Parler

As Forbes reported, it rose to prominence over the last year after Facebook and Twitter began fact-checking and putting disclaimers on inaccurate posts and tweets, to which many conservative political figures and most notably Trump, took umbrage.

As many of Trump's allies and similarly minded conservatives considered this censorship, they flocked to Parler and made up the overwhelming majority of its user base.

Part of that has to do with Parler's "hands off" policy for content moderation and its use of a "community jury" system.

Reddit | kate7246, Netflix

As The Washington Post reported, this sees volunteers within the community vote on posts to determine whether they violate the site's rules.

This fosters a system where the site's users essentially govern themselves except in explicit or implicit cases where users are encouraging violence or illegal activity.

However, neither Google, Apple, nor Amazon found this policy sufficient in the wake of the Capitol riot.

Reddit | Potato_Sponge

As The Guardian reported, this was because Parler was both identified as a hub for those responsible for the attack and because it was unwilling to crack down on those glorifying the event.

As a result, both Google and Apple suspended Parler from their app stores, limiting the reach of the platform.

But the killing blow seemed to come from Amazon, as Parler relied on the technical infrastructure provided by their Amazon Web Services wing to function.

As a result, Parler is now offline and it is now unclear as to when it will return, if at all.

Twitter | @Josh_Groeneveld

As The Washington Post reported, Parler CEO John Matze initially stated that the app would be off the internet for at least a week as the company "rebuilds from scratch."

Since this would involve securing hundreds of servers, however, this timeline turned out to be overly ambitious.

On January 11, Matze posted another statement indicating that the platform's hiatus would be "longer than expected."

In a statement shown in this tweet by reporter Scott Rodd, Matze attributes this to the fact that neither the site's vendors nor anyone else with the server capacity to support it wants anything to do with it after hearing why Google, Apple and Amazon pulled the plug on it.

As The Washington Post reported, Matze has stated during a Fox News interview that Parler could go out of business as a result.

h/t: The Guardian, The Washington Post

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