Parler is seeking unspecified monetary damages
from Amazon.
Its original lawsuit, filed in January in Seattle’s
federal district court, was billed primarily
as an antitrust action, accusing Amazon of
collaborating with Twitter to sink Parler’s
business. Parler voluntarily dismissed that suit
late Tuesday, an hour before a court-imposed
deadline to file an amended complaint in
the case.
Parler has said that Amazon’s primary motivation
in pulling the plug on its services was in support
of Twitter, a new AWS client.
Amazon’s decision to cut ties with Parler
temporarily wiped the social network from the
web, costing it hundreds of millions of dollars
in advertising revenue, the new suit contends.
Moreover, Amazon’s claims that Parler was
“unwilling or unable” to remove problematic
content were false, Parler said in its new suit,
and had the effect of defaming the website to
the extent that other large cloud-computing
providers have been unwilling to work with it.
Parler has also argued in its new suit that the
problematic content Amazon presented as a
rationale for taking it off the web represented
only a fraction of all posts and comments
on Parler.
“There is no merit to these claims,” an AWS
spokesperson said in a statement. “As shown
by the evidence in Parler’s federal lawsuit, it
was clear that there was significant content on
Parler that encouraged and incited violence
against others, which is a violation of our terms
of service.”