On Monday night, Australia-New Zealand time, Amazon made good on its threat to purge Parler from the internet.
In doing so, Amazon not only showed a glaring double standard, it also broke the terms of its own contract with the fledgling social media company.
On Monday, Parler filed a lawsuit against Amazon, accusing the company of breaching its contract and violating a century-old antitrust law by promoting Twitter at its competitor’s expense. Amazon had removed Parler from its servers on Monday morning, claiming the conservative social media platform refused to remove posts advocating violence at the Capitol riots last Wednesday.
Amazon cited just 98 posts as supposedly “advocating violence” – at the same time that “Hang Mike Pence” was a trending topic on Twitter, with over 14,000 tweets. Parler has also suggested that many of the offending posts were false flags: noting that the site had experienced a suspicious surge in new users who immediately began posting violent threats.
Feminist Christina Hoff Sommers has likewise noted that, when she said that she had never experienced online threats from men, within minutes brand-new accounts with stereotypically male names began flooding her feed with violent threats.
The stink hanging over its action is that Amazon is colluding with other tech titans to crush an upstart rival. A cynic might say that the real threat was to Silicon Valley’s monopolistic, iron grip on the online public sphere.
Due to Amazon’s removal, “Parler will be offline for a financially devastating period,” the lawsuit claims[…]
Amazon acted just as conservatives were flocking from Twitter to Parler, following Twitter’s ban of President Donald Trump’s accounts.
“Given the context of Parler’s looming threat to Twitter and the fact that the Twitter ban might not long muzzle the President if he switched to Parler, potentially bringing tens of millions of followers with him, AWS moved to shut down Parler,” the lawsuit alleges.
More legally pertinent is that Amazon appears to have clearly violated its own contract with Parler.
Amazon leaked the story of Parler’s termination to BuzzFeed more than an hour before it bothered to inform Parler itself. BuzzFeed reported that AWS would remove Parler at 11:59 p.m. Pacific time Sunday night, in an article published at 6:07 p.m. Pacific on Saturday. Amazon did not email Parler about the termination until 7:19 p.m. Pacific, “meaning AWS leaked the letter to BuzzFeed before sending it to Parler.”
Parler’s contract with AWS stipulated that AWS must give notice 30 days before the termination of a contract.
Parler users were already noticing a notable slow-down in the site’s performance, due entirely to the massive flood of new users in the wake of Twitter’s Trump ban.
AWS’s “death blow … could not come at a worse time for Parler—a time when the company is surging with the potential of even more explosive growth in the next few days[…]It is no wonder, then, that competitor Twitter’s CEO has heartily endorsed efforts to remove Parler from the public sphere.”
While Parler clearly has the moral high ground, what counts in court is the law. Parler has some big legal arguments on its side.
Parler brings three claims against Amazon. It accuses AWS of violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act by “contracting or conspiring to restrain trade or commerce.” It accuses AWS of breach of contract “by not providing thirty days’ notice before terminating its account.” Finally, it accuses Amazon of “tortious interference with a contract or business expectancy.” By terminating Parler’s contract, “AWS will intentionally interfere with the contracts Parler has with millions of its present users, as well as with the users it is projected to gain this week.”
Parler has over 12 million users under contract, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit asks the Washington State district court to issue a temporary restraining order and an order forcing AWS to maintain Parler’s account until further notice from the court. It also seeks treble damages for the egregious attack on Parler’s ability to do business[…]
Amazon also faces at least one lawsuit for excluding conservative and Christian nonprofits from its charity program, Amazon Smile.
PJ Media
The left have made lawfare one of their most devasting weapons for decades. It’s long past time that conservatives learned to fight back.
In the meantime, Parler would do well to take its cues from Gab. The tech titans similarly tried any way they could to crush their free-speech-positive rival. Time and again, Gab learned to sidestep Big Tech and now is also currently experiencing a massive surge in users.
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