hate, rather it advocates the right to private
judgment and rejects the role of being the
judge, jury and executioner. Unfortunately, too
many of our fellow technology providers seem
to differ in their position on this subject.”
Mattossian added that his company applauded
Parler’s new community guidelines.
For a time after Amazon dropped it, Parler
received denial-of-service protection from a
Russian-based outfit called DDoS-Guard. That
ended following revelations that DDoS-Guard
had provided services to shady operations,
including online forums popular with credit
card thieves.
In a lawsuit seeking to force Amazon to restore
its service, Parler’s management claimed that
Amazon aimed to deny Trump “a platform on
any large social-media service.” That followed
Twitter’s decision to permanently ban the
former president from its service and similar
indefinite bans by Facebook and Instagram.
Parler’s previous CEO, John Matze, says he was
fired on Jan. 29 by the Parler board, which is
controlled by conservative donor Rebekah
Mercer. At the time, Matze told The New York
Times that he’d told Mercer that Parler needed
to consider preventing domestic terrorists,
white supremacists and followers of QAnon,
a baseless conspiracy theory, from posting
on the platform.
The 2 1/2-year-old social media site claims
20 million users. Trump never established an
account there, although Buzzfeed reported that
he considered buying a stake in Parler while he
was president.