Parler CEO Condemns Use of Platform for Violence After Amazon Takedown

Parler founder and CEO John Matze speaks to The Epoch Times' Jan Jiekelek on "American Thought Leaders" in 2019. (Screenshot/The Epoch Times)

The CEO of Parler, John Matze, condemned the usage of the platform for violence and pushed back against claims that his company did not take responsibility for content posted on the site.

Early Monday morning, Amazon Web Services took down Parler—coming after Google and Apple removed the services from their respective app stores.

“We would never condone it, we have a lot of things in place to stop it,” said Matze of users inciting violence, adding that Parler is about free speech.

“I’m not interested in seeing our platform or any other platform frankly used as a tool for violence and spreading violence,” Matze told Fox Business. “We were never about that, we never advertised as being that.”

Amazon, Apple, and Google “are using this as an opportunity to squash the first real competitor in this space,” Matze remarked, adding that Parler has 20 million users and was the No. 1 app on Apple’s App Store when it was removed.

It came as Parler filed a lawsuit against Amazon, arguing the Seattle-based firm violated U.S. anti-trust laws and their contractual agreement.

Parler said that Amazon’s move was “motivated by political animus” and was designed to reduce competition to benefit Twitter. Twitter is currently a customer of Amazon Web Services’ division.

Amazon “will kill Parler’s business—at the very time it is set to skyrocket,” Parler’s complaint said.

“When Twitter announced two evenings ago that it was permanently banning President Trump from its platform, conservative users began to flee Twitter en masse for Parler. The exodus was so large that the next day, yesterday, Parler became the number one free app downloaded from Apple’s App Store,” the lawsuit reads.

Google, Apple, and Amazon took action after claiming that Parler was used as a tool for incitement in the midst of the breach at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Around the same time, Twitter, Facebook, and other tech companies banned President Donald Trump from using their services.

Amazon has not responded to a request for comment.

On Sunday, Parler officials said it would take as long as a week to get their services back online and might have to rebuild their network.

Matze wrote in a post: “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.”