Social Media App Used By Far-Right Removed From Internet after Pro-Trump Riots

By Staff, Agencies

Social media app Parler was removed from the internet in the wake of the violence in Washington, DC.

Amazon, which had provided the online tools to run the app, informed Parler that it would be cutting support from midnight local pacific time on Sunday. Soon after that deadline arrived, the site and its app went offline.

Visitors will now only see error messages informing them that the technology underpinning the site is not working properly.

Amazon had told Parler that it had seen “a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms.” Amazon Web Services sent a detailed letter to the company including instances of such violent content and making clear that it believes “Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service.”

Before the shutdown, Parler chief executive John Matze had suggested the outage could last a week but then posted on the site to inform users that it will “likely be down longer than expected." That was a result of other vendors dropping support for the site in the wake of public statements by Amazon, Google and Apple, he said.

Matze told Fox News that “every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers all ditched us too,” suggesting that other companies were taking their lead from Apple and Google.

The app had already been removed by Apple and Google from their app stores.

Google’s ban came on Friday and was followed by Apple, which said it had given Parler 24 hours to fix its moderation issues or face a ban, which went into effect after that.