Jan. 11 (UPI) — The conservative-friendly social media site Parler, where many of President Donald Trump’s more violent supporters often gathered to communicate, went dark early Monday after Amazon ended its relationship with the platform.
Amazon removed Parler from its web hosting service at midnight Sunday and the platform was entirely unreachable on the Internet a few hours later.
Amazon’s decision to sever ties followed identical moves by Google and Apple to remove the site from their app stores.
Last week’s attack on the U.S. Capitol by angry Trump supporters — many of whom had used Parler for weeks to discuss targeting lawmakers on Jan. 6, the day Congress gathered to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory — was the reason all three tech companies dismissed the platform.
Friday, Twitter permanently suspended Trump’s personal account “due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” following similar moves by Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
Amazon said it had informed Parler 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.
Dozens of Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol have been arrested and charged with criminal offenses, and authorities are trying to identify more.
Parler CEO John Matze wrote on the platform before it went dark Monday that the service could be unavailable for “up to a week.”
“We will try our best to move to a new provider right now as we have many competing for our business,” he wrote. “Amazon, Google and Apple purposefully did this as a coordinated effort knowing our options would be limited and knowing this would inflict the most damage right as President Trump was banned from the tech companies.
“We were too successful too fast. You can expect the war on competition and free speech to continue, but don’t count us out.”
