Parler, an increasingly popular forum for the far right, was told by Amazon that its web hosting would be suspended on Sunday, a move that practically guarantees that it will be disabled.
The lawsuit is the latest attempt by a technology company to crack down on incitement to violence following Wednesday’s violence in Washington by a pro-Trump crowd. Apple and Google expelled Parler from their respective app stores in the past 24 hours, while Twitter permanently suspended President Donald Trump’s account on Friday.
Unless Parler finds an alternative hosting company willing to take over his business, the site will no longer be able to function after 11:59 pm on Sunday, Pacific time.
The actions against Trump and Parler have intensified the debate over the powers of technology companies, as critics accuse them of trying to regulate online speech and censor conservative voices.
Parler had become an increasingly popular alternative to Twitter for conservatives irritated by what they saw as the liberal bias of the social media company. But it was popular with far-right activists who, critics say, used it as a platform to incite violence, including calls to assassinate Vice President Mike Pence.
The Amazon Cloud Division’s Trust and Security team, AWS, wrote in a letter to Parler policy director Amy Peikoff, that while providing technology to those with political views across the spectrum, she had been “bothered by repeated violations “of your moderation terms of service.
“We cannot provide services to a customer who is unable to effectively identify and remove content that encourages or incites violence against others,” said the letter, obtained initially by BuzzFeed News and verified by the Financial Times.
The letter stated that AWS had been in contact with the controversial forum for “several weeks”, bringing to its attention 98 instances of posts that “clearly encourage and incite violence”.
An Amazon spokeswoman declined to comment further.
When removing Parler, Apple explained that it respected several points of view, but that there was no place “on our platform for threats of violence and illegal activities”.
Parler, a self-styled “impartial social media network” that aims to defend “freedom of expression”, became the number one most downloaded on the Apple App Store after Twitter banned President Trump’s personal account on Friday.
In response, the outgoing president released a statement saying that he was “negotiating with several other sites” and considered the possibility “of building our own platform in the near future”.
Parler Chief Executive John Matze, posting on the website, said the company would rebuild “from scratch” and find a new host. He said the site would be offline for “up to a week”.
He suggested that the moves were an “attack coordinated by the tech giants to kill competition in the market”.
Dina Srinivasan, an antitrust scholar whose work has been instrumental in calling for dismantling Facebook, said Parler is an “excuse” to bring the collusion to the surface.
“To suggest that Amazon, Google and Apple coordinated an attack to silence Parler and Trump is ridiculous,” she said. “It is totally rational for any company to do the same.”
The decisive moves of the tech giants suggest that any new platform can have a challenge to become popular.
“American companies do not want to be complicit in an insurrection,” said Srinivasan.