Tech giants Amazon, Apple, and Google have all cut ties with Parler, the social media platform that is popular with some gamers, which could leave it without an internet home from midnight Sunday even as its users have been going up lately.
The three mega-corporations have been accused of the platform for posting messages inciting violence even after Wednesday’s deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump.
If Parler is unable to find a new hosting partner before Monday afternoon, when Amazon cuts off its services, the site will not be able to operate.
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A day after Twitter on Friday permanently suspended the president’s main account, Parler remained the most downloaded app in the U.S. from the Apple app store.
The social network, launched in 2018, works much like Twitter, with profiles that people can follow and “parleys” instead of tweets. Freedom of feeling is his named raison d’etre.
Based in Henderson, Nevada, Parler was founded by John Matze, a young computer engineer, and Rebekah Mercer, a well-known Republican donor.
In its early days, the platform attracted a crowd of ultra-conservative or even real-world users.
It now attracts many more traditional Republican voices.
Parler has 7.6 million followers in Fox News star Sean Hannity; his colleague Tucker Carlson has 4.4 million.
There are also elected officials, including Republican Devin Nunes, a convener in California, and South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem.
There has been a lot of growth recently in the last few days when new users, angry about Trump’s Twitter ban, came to the app.
Trump’s accounts have also been hacked by other major social media outlets including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitch in the wake of the violence at the Capitol.
That has sent even more of the president’s strong supporters to conservative platforms including both Parler and Gab.
Their success attracted the attention of Google, which decided late Friday to let Parler out of its app store because of posts said by the internet giant that incited violence, in addition to what was regards it as an overly steep approach to content conversion.
A day later, Apple followed suit.
These moves move complex things for Parler but have not completely stopped it: users who already had the app could continue to access it, while they could for new users to use work-around to install or access it on the internet.
Amazon’s decision, on the other hand, directly threatens Parler’s online presence – and CEO Matze isn’t optimistic.
“Every vendor, from text messaging services to email providers to all of our lawyers was also condemning us, on the same day,” he told Fox. “They are trying to make a false claim that we were responsible for the events of the sixth” of January when the Capitol was attacked.
“It’s devastating.”
Matze said it would be difficult to get back online quickly because potential service providers said they did not want to cooperate against Google or Apple.
Parler was given 24 hours to find another host but, Matze said, “Where can you get 300-to-500 servers in a 24-hour window? … It’s an impossible trick.”
With the technical giants making their challenges clear, it looks like conservation sites like Parler will need to find ways to change.
So the DLive video streaming service, used by several campaigners during the Capitol attack, closed seven of its channels and pulled more than 100 videos off-site.
Other services may need an example of another popular site on the far right, Gab.
That platform drew strong criticism in 2018 when investigators found that the hunter who killed 11 people in an attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue had posted anti-Semitic messages on the site earlier.
Gab, which was already outsourced by Apple and Google, installed its own servers to avoid relying on outside providers.