At 11:59 pm Sunday, January 10 Parler’s servers officially went offline. If you try to log in you will see an error message like the one above. Amazon’s AWS (Amazon Web Services) who hosted their servers said they violated the terms of service agreement due to “violent content”. While it is probable there is violent content on Parler, the same is true for Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, Apple’s App Store, and Google’s Play Store. If you want to see for yourself, just type any city and the word “protest” into Facebook and you will quickly find tons of groups rallying their people for various purposes whether liberal or conservative.
Censorship is a huge fear for Americans because speaking freely is a core principle this country was founded on. The first amendment was meant to protect people from being silenced by their government. Private businesses are not bound by this and can technically remove anyone they want from their platform as long as it is not done in a discriminating manner. In the case of Parler, they are clearly being singled out. These companies are setting a dangerous precedent that will hopefully be challenged in court. If they can shut down a company with 10 million users they can and will shut anyone down.
Parler Ceo John Matze said “We will likely be down longer than expected. This is not due to software restrictions, we have our software and everyone’s data ready to go. Rather it’s that Amazon’s, Google’s and Apple’s statements to the press about dropping our access has caused most of our other vendors to drop their support for us as well. And most people with enough servers to host us have shut their doors to us.” Currently, it is unclear when or if the site or app will come back up.