Amazon.com Inc. has stopped hosting social network Parler Inc. on its platform, while Alphabet Inc. unit Google LLC and Apple Inc. have removed the company's application from their respective app stores, Parler CEO John Matze confirmed.
The suspension from Amazon Web Services Inc. went into effect on Jan. 10 at 11:59 p.m. PST.
While Matze initially told Parler users that the site might be unavailable for as long as a week because of the move, he later said the site "will likely be down for longer than expected." He explained that Amazon's, Google's and Apple's decisions to cease hosting the service had caused most of Parler's other vendors to also drop support for the site.
This sent many conservative users to Parler, which bills itself as the "world's premier free speech platform."
In the wake of the deadly riots in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, major social platforms such as Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc. and YouTube LLC removed President Donald Trump's posts and banned the U.S. president's accounts from posting further information based on the argument that his posts risked inciting further violence. Twitter subsequently permanently suspended Trump's account. Parler, however, continued to share Trump's posts, and those of groups like the Proud Boys.
AWS' trust and safety team told Parler's Chief Policy Officer Amy Peikoff in an email cited by a Jan. 9 BuzzFeed News report that it is "troubled by the repeated violations" of Parler's rules on content moderation. AWS also said it "cannot provide services to a customer that is unable to effectively identify and remove content that encourages or incites violence against others."
Similarly, Google said in a statement that it suspended Parler from its own app store due to "continued posting in the Parler app that seeks to incite ongoing violence in the U.S."
But Matze said in a Jan. 10 statement that Parler's leaders "do not condone or accept violence on our platform and we never will." He pointed to Parler's community guidelines, which expressly forbid content that incites or threatens violence.
However, he also noted Parler can be slower than other platforms in removing content that violates those guidelines. "Parler is not a surveillance app, so we can't just write a few algorithms that will quickly locate 100% of objectionable content, especially during periods of rapid growth and the seemingly coordinated malicious attacks that accompany that growth," Matze said.