- Parler CEO John Matze said the app could never go online again, Reuters reported.
- The social media site went offline after Amazon launched Parler from its web hosting service.
- “It could never be,” Matze told Reuters when asked when the app would return. “We do not know yet.”
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Parler’s CEO said the social media app may never come online again.
John Matze, who founded the app in 2018, told Reuters he wasn’t sure if the app would return after Amazon removed Parler from its web hosting service. Amazon removed Parler for violating its terms of service, which prohibit content that “encourages or incites violence against others”.
“It could never be,” Matze told Reuters when asked when the app would return. “We do not know yet.”
Conservatives asked his followers to join Parler after Twitter permanently suspended President Donald Trump’s account for violating his civic integrity policy in the wake of a violent pro-Trump crowd that stormed the U.S. Capitol building. Parler jumped to number one on the App Store before Apple and Google removed the app from their stores.
Read More: EXCLUSIVE: Parler is a Microsoft Office 365 user, and Microsoft employees are discussing the ethics of having the far-right social application as a customer
Parler sued Amazon for removing the service, claiming that the decision was politically motivated and anti-competitive, since Twitter remained on AWS. Amazon responded quickly to the lawsuit, citing more than 100 examples of violent content that violated the company’s terms of service.
The social media company registered its domain name with Epik, a company known for hosting other social networks used by far-right extremists, days after being expelled from Amazon. Epik said in a January 11 statement that he “had no contact or discussion” with Parler about using the service.
Matze told Reuters he was in talks with more than one cloud computing service to discuss Parler’s hosting. He told The Blaze, a right-wing channel founded by Glenn Beck, that several vendors have given up on hosting the app “at the last second” and have started building Parler’s “own infrastructure” to put it back online.
Matze did not cite specific services that declined to host Parler.
“It is difficult to know how many people are telling us that we can no longer do business with them,” Matze told Reuters.