Conservative social network Parler was kicked out of the Internet because of ties to the United States Capitol siege
Conservative social network Parler was kicked off the internet on Monday for ties to last week’s siege of the United States Capitol, but not before hackers stole a file of their posts, including anyone who may have helped organize or document the riot.
Amazon expelled Parler from its web hosting service, and the social media app promptly sued to go back online, telling a federal judge that the tech giant had breached its contract and abused its market power.
It was a roller coaster of activities for Parler, a 2-year-old magnet from the far right that received a wave of new users and became the No. 1 free app for iPhones at the end of last week, after Facebook, Twitter and other social networks conventional media platforms have silenced President Donald Trump’s reports of comments that seemed to incite Wednesday’s violent uprising.
The wave of Trump followers flocking to the service was short-lived. Google removed Parler’s smartphone app from its app store on Friday for allowing posts to “incite continuing violence in the U.S.”
Apple did the same on Saturday after giving Parler a day to address complaints that it was being used to “plan and facilitate even more illegal and dangerous activities”. Later, Amazon joined it, which informed Parler that it would need to look for a new web hosting service after Sunday.
Parler CEO John Matze condemned the punishments as “a coordinated attack by the tech giants to eliminate competition in the market”.
Parler’s lawsuit in a Seattle-based federal court argues that Amazon violated antitrust laws to harm Parler and help Twitter. He also claims that Amazon breached his contract by failing to give 30 days notice before closing Parler’s account. Amazon and Parler did not return requests for comment on the dispute on Monday.
Matze signaled that there is little chance of having Parler back online anytime soon after “all the providers, from text messaging services to email providers and our lawyers, also dismissed us on the same day,” he told Fox New Channel. Morning Futures. “
In an interview with Fox Business on Monday, he said the company “may even have to go as far as buying and building our own data centers and buying our own servers.”
Trump can also launch his own platform. But it won’t happen overnight, and free speech experts predict growing pressure on all social media platforms to contain incendiary speech as Americans take stock of the violent takeover of the United States Capitol by a crowd prompted by Trump.
Meanwhile, a group of hacker activists rescued much of what happened in Parler before he went offline and said they plan to put it in a public archive. One described the operation on Twitter as “a bunch of people running into a burning building trying to grab as many things as we can”.
The action of downloading and archiving posts, including image files that can be linked to geographical locations, instilled some fear in Parler’s users, although the police probably would have been able to access the data anyway, and experts said the file did not. includes information that was not accessible to the public.
“If this were not done, we would have only fragments and fragments of the information that was in Parler before the removal,” said Gabriella Coleman, an anthropologist at McGill University who studied hacking movements. “It is important because these forums are increasingly where people come together to organize themselves. You learn about motivations, ideological tactics. “
Coleman said Trump’s supporters are likely to find other ways to communicate, like encrypted messaging apps or outdated email lists, but only if they already know where to find groups with similar ideas.
“Where losing places like Twitter or Parler hurts is for recruiting,” she said.