Last month, Amazon abruptly removed Parler from its servers. Their reasoning? “Systematic failure to remove violent and hateful content.” From NPR:
Before Amazon took down Parler, the messaging app favored by far-right activists, Amazon says it flagged dozens of instance of violent and hateful posts that Parler “systematically failed” to remove…
In a new filing, Amazon argues it was Parler that failed to abide by Amazon’s terms of service, allowing hateful content to multiply on its platform even after last week’s attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“This case is about Parler’s demonstrated unwillingness and inability to remove from the servers of Amazon Web Services … content that threatens the public safety, such as by inciting and planning the rape, torture, and assassination of named public officials and private citizens,” Amazon wrote to the court.
“AWS notified Parler repeatedly that its content violated the parties’ agreement, requested removal, and reviewed Parler’s plan to address the problem, only to determine that Parler was both unwilling and unable to do so,” Amazon added.
Amazon said that since November, it reported to Parler more than 100 instances of content promoting violence, including calls to hang, shoot or kill Black and Jewish people, lawmakers, tech CEOs, police officers and others.
During one of the calls, according to Amazon’s filing, Parler’s CEO reported a backlog of 26,000 reports of content that violated its community standards but remained posted.
It would appear that Parler had failed to address violation complaints due to a lack of resources. It doesn’t look like there were any violations that Parler moderators had seen, examined, and refused to remove – even though they were clear violations.
The same cannot be said for Twitter – which is also hosted by Amazon. You can read about it here or, better yet, watch this video by David Wood:
It’s hard to imagine a more blatant example of double standards and twisted priorities.
If you still have a Twitter account, please do what’s right and deactivate it – if you have any choice in the matter.
