Filing: Amazon warned Speak for months against “over 100” violent threats

Amazon provided receipts on Tuesday in its response to the lawsuit filed by the apparently obsolete social networking platform Speak, detailing AWS’s repeated efforts to get Speak to respond to explicit threats of violence posted on the service.

Following the violent insurgency on the United States Capitol last Wednesday, AWS kicked Speak from its web hosting platform Sunday night at midnight. In response, Parler filed a lawsuit accusing Amazon of breaking a contract for political reasons and colluding with Twitter to take a competitor offline.

But the ban has nothing to do with “stifling views” or a “conspiracy” to hold back a competitor, Amazon said in its response brief (PDF). Instead, Amazon said, “This case concerns Parler’s demonstrated reluctance and inability to remove actively dangerous content, including posts that incite and plan” rape, torture and murder. public officials and private citizens … AWS suspended the Talking account as a last resort to prevent further access to this content, including plans of violence to disrupt the impending presidential transition. “

“If there is a violation, it is Parler’s demonstrated failure and inability to identify and remove this content,” Amazon added. “Forcing AWS to host content that plans, encourages and incites violence would be unprecedented.”

Not at all suddenly

To an outside observer, both the rapid rise of Parler and its full blossoming at the end of last week and over the weekend may have seemed extremely sudden. Parler was launched in 2018, but only gained real popularity a few months ago, around the November election.

Reports began to surface in December that right-wing fringe elements were using Talking and other platforms to plan a protest or rally of some sort in Washington, DC on January 6. The whole world saw how these “gatherings” unfolded last week. .

Last Friday, following the events on Capitol Hill, Google banned Parler from the Android App Store, citing the platform’s failure to remove “blatant content such as messages inciting violence.” Apple followed suit a day later, similarly suspending Talking about iOS due to its inability to tackle “the proliferation of these threats to the safety of people.” By the end of the weekend, Parler had also gotten AWS to boot up and gone completely offline.

But far from being suddenly cut off, Talking had month warning, Amazon says. Amazon’s file included copies of emails sent to Speak in mid-November (PDF, content warning for racial slurs) containing screenshots full of racist slurs about Democrats, including l ‘Former First Lady Michelle Obama, with a series of responses from other users to “kill’ em all.”

Amazon provided “over 100 additional representative content” advocating violence against Parler over the next seven weeks, the company said. Another document on file (PDF, also with a content warning for racial slurs and threats of violence) features dozens of examples of posts Amazon reported to Speak, as of mid-December. These messages call, among other things: to kill a specific transgender person; actively wishing for a race war and the murder of blacks and Jews; and the murder of several activists and politicians such as Stacey Abrams, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (DN.Y.) and former President Barack Obama.

Representatives from AWS spoke to the executive leadership of Parler on Jan. 8 and 9 about the “platform’s content moderation policies, processes and tools,” Amazon said. In response, Parler reportedly proposed measures that would be based on “voluntary” moderation, and Parler CEO John Matze reportedly told AWS that “Parler had a backlog of 26,000 reports of content that violated its community standards and remained at his service ”.

Legitimate concerns

The violent threats made by at least some Parler users unfortunately turned out to be far from hypothetical.

Almost all of Parler’s content was archived before the service went completely offline. Gizmodo reporters who delved into this archived data were able to find several hundred Parler users posting videos to the platform from or near the Capitol during the events of January 6.

Ad hoc efforts on Reddit and Twitter to pull together screenshots and videos from Speaking, also shows a disturbing pattern of threats and claims made on the platform in the days before and after the Jan.6 uprising.

As the Washington Post reported on Tuesday, the FBI was also well aware of credible threats of violence made online. On January 5, the day before rioters stormed the Capitol, an FBI office in Norfolk, Virginia, released a memo in part: “An online discussion thread discussed the specific calls to violence, including saying, “Be ready to fight. break-ins, doors broken down and the blood of their BLM and Pantifa slave soldiers sunk. Be violent. Stop calling it a march, rally, or protest. Go there ready for war. We will have our president or we will die. NOTHING otherwise will achieve this goal. ‘”

Unfortunately, threats of violence have not abated either. The District of Columbia is slowly turning into a fortress ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration next week, as credible threats of violence continue to target not only the nation’s capital, but state capitals as well.