US judge denies Parler's bid to have web services immediately restored by Amazon, keeping social site offline, but doesn't dismiss claim altogether
A federal judge on Thursday rejected Parler's demand that Amazon immediately restore web hosting services for the social media platform, which Amazon had cut off following the January 6 storming of the US Capitol.
US District Judge Barbara Rothstein in Seattle said she wasn't dismissing Parler's 'substantive underlying claims' against Amazon, but said it had fallen short in demonstrating the need for an injunction forcing it back online through Amazon's web services.
This means that while she didn't rule for Amazon to restore Parler's website immediately, the case still is making its way through the court and eventually could be ruled on in Parler's favor - or not.
The decision also said Parler had 'failed to demonstrate that it is likely to prevail on the merits' of any of the three claims it had presented to the court.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) suspended Parler on January 10. It came after Google and Apple removed Parler from their app stores, effectively making it unavailable as a smartphone app.
AWS has said Parler violated its contract by ignoring repeated warnings to effectively address steady growth in violent content, including calls to assassinate prominent Democratic politicians, leading business executives and the media.
Parler CEO John Matze asserted in a court filing that Parler's abrupt shutdown was motivated at least partly by 'a desire to deny President Trump a platform on any large social-media service'.
A federal judge on Thursday rejected Parler's demand that Amazon restore web hosting services for the social media platform, which Amazon had cut off following the January 6 storming of the US Capitol
Parler CEO John Matze (pictured) asserted in a court filing that Parler's abrupt shutdown was motivated at least partly by 'a desire to deny President Trump a platform on any large social-media service'
Matze said Trump had contemplated joining the network as early as October under a pseudonym. The Trump administration last week declined to comment on whether he had planned to join.
Parler also said Amazon had no contractual right to pull the plug, and did so out of 'political animus' to benefit Twitter, a larger Amazon client that Parler said did not censor violent content targeting conservatives.
Amazon denied its move to pull the plug on Parler had anything to do with political animus. It claimed that Parler had breached its business agreement 'by hosting content advocating violence and failing to timely take that content down'.
The Seattle federal court pointed out the objectionable posts in its decision Thursday.
'The Court rejects any suggestion that the public interest favors requiring [Amazon] to host the incendiary speech that the record shows some of Parler’s users have engaged in' the judge wrote.
Parler was formed in May 2018, according to Nevada business records, with what co-founder Rebekah Mercer, a prominent Trump backer and conservative donor, later described as the goal of creating 'a neutral platform for free speech' away from 'the tyranny and hubris of our tech overlords'.
Amazon said the company signed up for its cloud computing services about a month later, thereby agreeing to its rules against dangerous content.
Matze told the court that Parler has 'no tolerance for inciting violence or lawbreaking' and has relied on volunteer 'jurors' to flag problem posts and vote on whether they should be removed.
More recently, he said the company informed Amazon it would soon begin using artificial intelligence to automatically pre-screen posts for inappropriate content, as bigger social media companies do.
Amazon last week revealed a trove of incendiary and violent posts that it had reported to Parler over the past several weeks.
They included explicit calls to harm high-profile political and business leaders and broader groups of people, such as schoolteachers and Black Lives Matter activists.
Court documents released on Thursday said: 'The Court explicitly rejects any suggestion that the balance of equities or the public interest favors obligating AWS to host the kind of abusive, violent content at issue in this case, particularly in light of the recent riots at the US Capitol.
Amazon claimed that Parler had breached its business agreement 'by hosting content advocating violence and failing to timely take that content down'
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