Parler’s social media platform has sued Amazon.com Inc. after the tech giant abruptly discontinued web hosting services for the company, effectively halting its activity.
In a complaint filed Monday in Seattle federal court, Parler said Amazon Web Services kicked the company off their cloud servers for political and anti-competitive reasons. The conservative social network set up in 2018 exploded in popularity among President Trump supporters after the U.S. election in November.
“AWS’s decision to terminate Parler’s account appears to be motivated by political vitality. It also appears to have been designed to reduce competition in the microblogging services market to the benefit of Twitter, ”according to the complaint, which also accused Amazon of breaching a contract between the parties.
Amazon said Saturday it would cut off Parler for not being confident in his ability to police enough content on his platform that encourages violence. The company said that while it would no longer provide Parler web services after Sunday at 11:59 pm during Pacific time, it would store platform data and help migrate to different servers.
In his complaint, Parler also accused Amazon of implementing double status than with other platforms, noting that Twitter had signed a multi-year web hosting contract with its company.