Amazon Says Parler Lawsuit Is Invalid Because Of Terms Of Service Violations

Amazon has hit back against social media site Parler in its lawsuit over the site’s removal from the cloud of Amazon Web Services (AWS), court documents say.

The core of the issue comes as Parler, which became known over the last few months as a hub for conservative political views, was booted off Amazon and other web servers after the Jan. 6 raid on the Capitol by supporters of President Trump.

Parler, according to Amazon, hosted “content that threatens the public safety,” and thus Amazon had no mandate to host the site.

Parler’s side of the story is that AWS breached contract by removing the site, particularly without the required several weeks’ notice.

The court documents note that Parler has marketed itself on its lax moderation of content, with its homepage telling users to “speak freely and express yourself freely.”

Amazon posits that when it signed up for AWS, Parler agreed to the Terms of Service policies, which state that companies can’t use AWS to host content that “violates the rights of others, or that may be harmful to others.”

The court document goes on to list examples of content posted on Parler in late 2020, which AWS followed up with the site, asking if they violated the site’s terms of service. Parler responded that it had referred one example to its “regular contact for investigation.”

AWS says it saw numerous other examples over the weeks after that. The examples consist of numerous death threats against popular politicians and social media figures, in addition to threats to “fight a civil war” on Jan. 20, the court documents say.

Parler sued Amazon earlier this week, PYMNTS writes, and in its filing, blamed the issue on “politics and competition,” and was seeking a temporary restraining order to prevent the site from being removed from the cloud.

Parler was founded in 2018, but began to attract significantly more users after the November 2020 election, which some conservatives contested.