Amazon filed receipts on Tuesday in its response to Parler’s seemingly defunct social networking platform, detailing AWS’s repeated efforts to get Parler to deal with explicit threats of violence posted on the service.
In the wake of the violent uprising on the United States Capitol last Wednesday, AWS expelled Parler from its web hosting platform at midnight on Sunday. In response, Parler filed a lawsuit accusing Amazon of breaking a contract for political reasons and colluding with Twitter to take a competitor off the air.
But the ban has nothing to do with “stifling views” or a “conspiracy” to contain a competitor, Amazon said in its response form (PDF). Instead, Amazon said, “This case is about Parler’s demonstrated unwillingness and inability” to remove actively dangerous content, including posts that incite and plan “rape, torture and murder of public officials and named private citizens.” . AWS suspended Parler’s account as a last resort to prevent further access to such content, including plans for violence to interrupt the impending presidential transition. “
“If there is any breach, it is the demonstrated failure and Parler’s inability to identify and remove such content,” added Amazon. “Forcing AWS to host content that plans, encourages and incites violence would be unprecedented.”
Not at all sudden
To an outside observer, both Parler’s rapid rise to prominence and his complete deplatform at the end of last week and at the weekend may have seemed extremely sudden. Parler was launched in 2018, but only gained widespread strength a few months ago, around the November elections.
Reports began to emerge in December that elements of the far right were using Parler and other platforms to plan a protest or meeting of some kind in Washington, DC, on January 6. The whole world saw how these “meetings” ended last week.
Last Friday, after the events on Capitol Hill, Google banned Parler from the Android app store, citing the platform’s failure to remove “shocking content like posts that incite violence”. Apple followed him a day later, similarly suspending Parler from iOS for his failure to deal with “the proliferation of these threats to people’s security”. At the end of the weekend, Parler was also kicked out of AWS and went completely offline.
But far from being cut suddenly, Parler months warning, Amazon says. Amazon’s filing included copies of emails it sent Parler in mid-November (PDF, content warning for racial slurs) containing screenshots full of racist slurs about Democrats, including former First Lady Michelle Obama, with a series of responses from other users to “kill them all.”
Amazon provided “more than 100 additional representative pieces of content” defending violence against Parler over the next seven weeks, the company said. Another document in the process (PDF, also with warning content for racial slander and threats of violence) presents dozens of examples of posts reported by Amazon to Parler, starting in mid-December. These posts ask, among other things: to kill a certain trans person; actively wishing for racial war and the murder of blacks and Jews; and killing several activists and politicians like Stacey Abrams, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (DN.Y.) and former President Barack Obama.
AWS representatives spoke with Parler’s executive leadership on January 8 and 9 about the platform’s “content moderation policies, processes and tools”, Amazon said. In response, Parler reportedly offered measures that would depend on “voluntary” moderation, and Parler CEO John Matze reportedly told AWS that “Parler had an accumulation of 26,000 reports of content that violated community standards and remained in his service. . “
Legitimate concerns
Unfortunately, violent threats from at least some Parler users are far from hypothetical.
Almost all of Parler’s content was archived before the service went completely offline. Gizmodo reporters searching the archived data were able to find several hundred Parler users who were posting videos on the platform inside or near the Capitol during the January 6 events.
Ad-hoc efforts on Reddit and Twitter to collect screenshots and video of Parler also shows a disturbing pattern of threats and claims made on the platform in the days before and after the January 6 uprising.
As The Washington Post reported on Tuesday, the FBI was also well aware of the threats of violence made online. On January 5, the day before the protesters broke into the Capitol, an FBI office in Norfolk, Virginia, issued a memo that read in part: “An online topic discussed specific calls for violence to include the statement ‘Be ready to Congress needs to hear the glass break in, doors kicked in and blood from its slave soldiers BLM and Pantifa being spilled. Be violent. Stop calling it a march, or a meeting or a protest. Come on ready for war. or we die. NOTHING else will achieve this goal. ‘”
Unfortunately, the threats of violence have not abated. The District of Columbia is slowly turning into a fortress before President-elect Joe Biden takes office next week, as credible threats of violence continue to strike not only the nation’s capital, but state capitals as well.