Conservative network Parler forced offline after Capitol violence

The conservative social network Parler has been forced offline after Amazon warned the company would lose access to its servers for its failure to properly police violent content.

The site's popularity soared in recent weeks, becoming the number one download from Apple's App Store after the much larger Twitter banned US President Donald Trump from its platform for his role in inciting a riot at the US Capitol last week.

Messages of support for Wednesday's attack in Washington DC, along with calls for more demonstrations, had flourished on the platform, leading Google to remove it from its app store on Friday, followed by Apple on Saturday.

Amazon then confirmed it would suspend the platform from its cloud hosting services for allowing "threats of violence."

In a letter to Parler's owners, the web giant said it would suspend service by 11:59 PM on Sunday (0759 GMT Monday).

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Host to Republican voices

Parler CEO John Matze decried the punishments as “a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the marketplace. We were too successful too fast,” he said in a Saturday night post, saying it was possible Parler would be unavailable for up to a week “as we rebuild from scratch.”

“Every vendor, from text message services, to e-mail providers, to our lawyers all ditched us too on the same day,” Matze said Sunday on Fox New Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures.” He said while the company is trying to get back online as quickly as possible, it’s “having a lot of trouble, because every vendor we talk to says they won’t work with us, because, if Apple doesn’t approve and Google doesn’t approve, they won’t.”

Losing access to the app stores of Google and Apple, whose operating systems power hundreds of millions of smartphones, severely limits Parler’s reach, though it had continued to be accessible via web browser.

"They will NOT win! We are the world's last hope for free speech and free information," he said.

Parler did not respond to a request for comment from AFP.

The social network, launched in 2018, operates much like Twitter, with profiles to follow and "parleys" instead of tweets.

In its early days, the platform attracted a crowd of ultra-conservative and even extreme-right users.

But it now attracts many more traditional Republican voices.

Fox News star host Sean Hannity has 7.6 million followers, while his colleague Tucker Carlson has 4.4 million.

Elected officials present include Republicans Devin Nunes, a California congressman, and South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem.

Trump is not known to have a Parler profile.

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Safe haven

Parler's recent growth was supercharged after last week’s violence in DC as new users, furious over Twitter's ban on Trump, flocked to the app.

In one now-deleted post, an account purporting to belong to Lin Wood, a pro-Trump lawyer, called for Vice President Mike Pence to be put in front of a firing squad -- threats which US media have reported led to a secret service investigation.

Supporters of President Trump expressed outrage at the news of the website being taken down.

Ahead of the shutdown, the President's son, Donald Trump Jr., complained that "big tech has totally eliminated the notion of free speech in America."

Prominent pro-Trump commentator and conspiracy theorist Mark Dice took to Twitter to accuse "Marxists" of taking Parler offline, urging followers to register on secure messaging app Telegram and Gab, another site popular with the far-right.

With tech giants making their opposition clear, conservative sites such as Parler are likely going to have to find ways to adjust.

The DLive video streaming service, used by several protesters during the invasion of the Capitol, closed seven of its channels and pulled more than 100 videos from the site.

Gab may now also become a model for other websites, with CEO Andrew Torba claiming it had attracted 600,000 new users Sunday.

The platform drew fierce criticism in 2018 when investigators found that the shooter who killed 11 people in an attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue had earlier posted anti-Semitic messages on the site.

It has installed its own servers so as not to be dependent on outside providers.

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