Parler’s CEO, John Matze, told Maria Bartiromo this morning that he’s not been able to find anyone to host Parler since they’ve been shut down by Amazon. He said even their backup venders, which he had deals with, have all abandoned him now in the wake of Google, Amazon, and Apple blackballing him.
I’ve transcribed important parts of the interview for you. This is how it begins:
I never thought we’d be living in a country where things like this would happen, where you’d get coordinated companies cancelling what you’re doing. Essentially the site is down, it’s a big black hole, and it’s horrible.
We woke up on Friday, we thought everything was normal. We were #1 on the apps store, literally #1 in the United States…ahead of Tik Tok, ahead of everybody, ahead of Facebook, ahead of Twitter.
There was no indication that we had any serious problems from Apple, Google, Amazon. There was no serious threats, no anything. We had cordial correspondence from all of them including weekly calls with Amazon.
Then all of a sudden there’s this massive threat and ‘we’re going to get rid of you tomorrow’. And now today, there’s no site remaining. We woke up on Friday, everything was fine. Now today, there’s nothing left.
Like I said Friday, we’re credibly a quarter of a billion dollar company, #1 in the apps store, and now we can’t even find anybody to host it.
We’ve called all – basically any of the big tech players, they all said no and it’s really, really a challenge. All the backup venders we already had deals with for hosting, even ones that after the fact said they would host us, all ended up dropping us at the last second.
Everything was fine Friday morning and now there’s no Parler. You know why? It’s not because of all the phony excuses that have been made by Google, Apple and Amazon. It’s because of the reports that President Trump joined Parler after he got banned by Twitter. That’s when Big Tech came crashing down on Parler, because they want to silence President Trump. It’s disgusting, but it’s real. Corporate authoritarianism, if you will. The Capitol riot gave these leftist companies exactly what they wanted, a reason to silence President Trump and his supporters.
Bartiromo made the brilliant point that our own intelligence community has confirmed that China is using TikTok to spy on Americans, but their apps haven’t been deleted by Big Tech companies like Apple and Google. It’s really clear who these leftists see as a real threat and it’s not Communist China.
When asked by Bartiromo if he plans to sue, Matze didn’t get into any specifics, only saying that there were different avenues Parler could go down.
He then highlighted the egregious double standard being used against him:
Nobody has presented any credible piece of information or evidence that there are any problems on Parler that don’t exist on other platforms. So there really is a double standard.
We’re really confused, because we see all sorts of nasty and threatening content on Twitter – much more of it, actually, in fact, in our opinion. And actually a lot of content that’s deleted from Parler still remains up on Twitter to this day in the form of screenshots. So I don’t understand what this is really about. Because it’s not about holding everybody to account equally, it’s about giving preferential treatment to certain people and taking it out on others. I totally see it that way.
Matze was asked if he saw any activity on Parler that would have played a part in inciting the Capitol riot that happened last week, and he said no, adding there’s no real way for that to even happen on Parler:
No there’s no evidence that Parler has anything to do with inciting any of that. There’s no mechanism to meet up or organize some kind of even like that on Parler. And so that’s not really something that Parler could have been used for.
Now I’m sure there are some people, just as there are on Facebook, Twitter, and everywhere else, kind of up-playing it, or making statements on it. If it was against our terms of service we’d remove it. Because frankly I’m not interested in seeing our platform or any other platform used as a tool for violence and spreading violence. We were never about that. We never advertised as being that. We advertised as something that’s free speech in the United States, what’s allowed by this country. We never, never promoted that kind of violence or anything like that. We would have never condoned it. We have a lot of things in place to stop it.
But Amazon and Apple and Google, they don’t care. They’re using this as an opportunity to squash the first real competitor in this space in so many years that’s showing that we can contest the market. So when they realized that the markets are contestable, they squash the competition.
If there’s a case for anti-trust, I think this is a pretty prime example, that the first real, tangible competitor squashed so quickly and so egregiously….
This is a huge case for anti-trust. There’s no question now that Twitter, Facebook and Amazon are abusing their power to squash the competition and need to be punished, if not broken up. The question remains as to whether the DOJ will get on board with an anti-trust lawsuit in Parler’s defense? I’d say with Biden coming in, it doesn’t look promising.
UPDATE: Parler has now sued Amazon. Read about it here.