Feb. 15 (UPI) — Parler, a social media app popular among conservatives, came back online Monday after it was booted off of Amazon’s cloud hosting service following the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
The website returned with a redesigned homepage after about a month offline, being removed from the major mobile app platforms and a failed legal challenge seeking to force Amazon to continue to host it.
“Speak freely and express yourself openly, without fear of being ‘deplatformed’ for your views,” the site’s new homepage states.
Parler also released a new community guidelines document declaring that it will not “knowingly allow itself to be used as a tool for crime, civil torts, or other unlawful acts,” while maintaining it prefers that “removing users or user-provided content be kept to the absolute minimum.”
“In no case will Parler decide what [content will] be removed or filtered, or whose account will be removed, on the basis of the opinion expressed within the content at issue,” the guidelines said.
Three days after the Capitol riot, Google and Apple removed the Parler app from their respective app stores saying it had failed to act on complaints about its content moderation policy.
Parler then went dark on Jan. 11 after Amazon said the company violated its Amazon Web Services cloud hosting platform’s terms of service by failing to act after being informed of about nearly 100 posts on its platform that “clearly encourage and incite violence,” some of which made violent threats against “liberal leaders” as well as activists and supporters.
The company then sued AWS, alleging the decision to end its relationship with Parler was politically motivated and that Amazon applied a double standard in how it treated Parler versus other social media companies, but a Washington district judge rejected the suit.
