The conservative social network Parler was forced offline on Monday, tracking Web sites showed, after Amazon told the company that it would lose access to its servers for its failure to properly police violent content.
The site’s popularity soared in the past few weeks, becoming the No. 1 free app in Apple’s App Store after the much larger Twitter banned US President Trump from its platform for his role in inciting a riot at the US Capitol on Wednesday.
Messages of support for the riot in Washington — along with calls for new demonstrations — had flourished on the platform, leading Google to remove it from its app store on Friday, followed by Apple on Saturday.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Amazon then confirmed it would suspend the platform from its cloud hosting services for allowing “threats of violence.”
In a letter to the Parler’s owners, the web giant said it would suspend service by 11:59pm on Sunday.
Tracking Web site Down For Everyone Or Just Me showed Parler offline just after midnight, suggesting that its owners had not been able to find a new hosting partner.
In a series of posts on Parler on Saturday, founder and chief executive John Matze said the site would go down the following day, and accused the tech giants of a “war on free speech.”
“They will NOT win! We are the worlds last hope for free speech and free information,” he said.
The social network, launched in 2018, operates much like Twitter, with profiles people can follow and “parleys” instead of tweets.
In its early days, the platform attracted ultra-conservative or even extreme-right users.
However, 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.
Trump is not known to have a Parler profile.
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 calling for fresh protests.
In one now-deleted post, an account purporting to belong to Lin Wood, a pro-Trump lawyer, called for US 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.
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