Parler Loses Amazon as Website Host, Will Go Dark at Midnight

The censorship of conservative voices continues, with social media site Parler expected to go dark Sunday night after Amazon Web Services’ pulls its support from the page after supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol Building on Wednesday. This comes after Apple decided to remove the Parler app from its platform.

If another host site cannot be found, Parler will effectively cease to exist on Sunday at 11:59 p.m.

Amazon is citing the threat of violence as its reason for the removal in a letter written to Parler’s Chief Policy Officer Amy Peikoff, who said, “I believe we were treated unfairly.”

The letter, published by Buzzfeed.com, reads in part, “We remain troubled by the repeated violations of our terms of service. Over the past several weeks, we’ve reported 98 examples to Parler of posts that clearly encourage and incite violence. Here are a few examples below from the ones we’ve sent previously: [See images above.]”

The letter continues, “It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service. It also seems that Parler is still trying to determine its position on content moderation. You remove some violent content when contacted by us or others, but not always with urgency…

“It’s our view that this nascent plan to use volunteers to promptly identify and remove dangerous content will not work in light of the rapidly growing number of violent posts. This is further demonstrated by the fact that you still have not taken down much of the content that we’ve sent you. Given the unfortunate events that transpired this past week in Washington, D.C., there is serious risk that this type of content will further incite violence.”

One of the posts cited by Amazon includes, “On January (redacted) we need to start systemically assassinating #liberal leaders, liberal activists, #blm leaders and supporters, members of the #nba, #nfl, #nhl, #mainstreammedia anchors and correspondents and #antifa. I already have a newsworthy event planned. #blmterrorists #militiia #civilwar #civilwar2”

This threat should be reported and properly investigated by security professionals. However, what Amazon doesn’t realize, or just simply ignores, is the very real possibility that taking down Parler won’t fix or alleviate the problem, it will just exacerbate it.

Over the last year or so, it’s become increasingly evident that conservative voices are being constrained by social media and big tech companies that hide behind “fact-checking” and concerns over violence, real or imagined, in order to censor those that they disagree with on cultural and policy issues.

Liberal threats and statements are usually not given the same scrutiny.

A great example from earlier this summer was when Twitter defended its decision to not block or limit the account of Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei but was instead more focused on censoring the tweets of Trump.

In a hearing in Israel regarding the decision, Twitter argued that the Ayatollah’s comments calling the Israeli people “a cancerous growth” or saying that the people should be “uprooted and destroyed” was little more than “foreign policy saber-rattling.”

“We have an approach to world leaders that presently say that direct interactions with fellow public figures, comments on political issues of the day, or foreign policy saber-rattling on military and economic issues are generally not in violation of our Twitter rules,” Twitter’s spokeswoman responded to a question about why the censorship against Trump and not the Ayatollah.

Twitter conveniently ignores that Iran remains involved in various terrorist activities and proxy wars throughout the Middle East, including the devastating proxy war with Saudi Arabia in Yemen and supplying the terrorist organization Hezbollah, which is directed funded by the Shiite state.

Iran is also second in the world when it comes to executions in 2018, killing at least 253 people. It is only outpaced by China.

Instead, Twitter flagged a tweet by Donald Trump, which read, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” in reaction to the protests and violence in Minneapolis. Flagging it was considered a “public interest notice.”

Amazon’s decision to remove Parler’s host website and the decision by Twitter to block Donald Trump’s account on Friday will do nothing but increase tension and mistrust of America’s most influential institutions.