Forced talk offline after Amazon pulls hosting services

Talk went offline after Amazon kept its promise to remove the controversial social media site from its AWS web hosting services. Amazon pulled the plug at 11:59 p.m. PT, saying Parler was not moderating its content properly and the violence claimed on the site posed “a very real risk to public safety.”

Parler CEO John Matze announced on his site Monday morning that the service would likely be down for a while and called Parler the “last fight on the Internet.”

“I wanted to send everyone on Speak an update. We will probably be down for longer than expected, ”Matze wrote on Monday morning. “It’s not due to software restrictions – we have our software and everyone’s data ready to go. Rather, it is that statements from Amazon, Google, and Apple to the press about dropping our access caused most of our other vendors to drop their support for us as well. “

Matze, a self-proclaimed libertarian, said on Sunday that absolutely no one wanted to do business with him and that big tech companies like Apple and Amazon colluded to “stifle free speech” by starting Talk from their platforms. shapes.

“All the providers, from text messaging to email providers to our lawyers, all abandoned us on the same day,” Marze cried to Maria Bartiromo on Sunday in a telephone interview on Fox News.

Speak climbed to the top of the Apple App Store on Saturday after President Donald Trump was permanently banned from Twitter, leading his neo-fascist supporters to search for an alternative social media site. Trump gave a speech on Jan.6 that prompted a riot on the U.S. Capitol, killing five, and Twitter said he banned Trump from reducing the likelihood of the president inspiring more violence.

But Parler faced new pressure in the wake of the attempted Capitol Hill coup to quell extremist calls for violence, which Apple gave the service 24 hours before its withdrawal on Sunday.

“Well, like I said, they claim that we were sort of responsible for, you know, what they call the 6th insurgency, which, you know, we never allowed violence. ..of this stuff on our platforms, ”said Matze.

You know, we never allowed any of these things on our platform. And we don’t even have a way to coordinate an event on our platform, so they kind of want to hold us accountable.

To be clear, Apple has never blamed Speak Out for the violence that took place on January 6. The company, like dozens of others, was just awakened to the fact that allowing pro-fascist rhetoric on its platforms could literally inspire a coup and bring in duly elected leaders of the US government, like the president-elect. Joe Biden.

Bartiromo has entered a strange tangent with Trump’s attempt to legislatively destroy Section 230, something Matze had previously opposed. But Matze now says he believes Section 230 should be abolished, a strange position for someone tasked with moderating a website where they could potentially be held criminally responsible without Section 230.

Matze also spoke of Amazon’s threats to start Speaking Sunday, complaining that he didn’t have enough time to find alternative accommodation.

“Amazon is the biggest cloud storage provider in the world, and we use it to host our servers, you know, hundreds of them, hundreds of servers. And they gave us… basically they said you have 24 hours to get all your data and find new servers, ”Matze told Bartiromo.

“So, you know, where are you going to find 300 to 500 servers in the 24 hour window, and how do you send everyone’s data to them in a 24 hour period?” It is an impossible feat. You know, we’re going to do our best to get back on line as quickly as possible. But, you know, it’s … there are just things that are practically impossible.

What kind of content will people now miss with Talk Offline? A video that was popular before the site went offline was made by a QAnon adherent who cut Trump’s old sound clips to make all of the subtext explicitly neo-fascist text.

“January 20 will be remembered as the day the people once again became the rulers of this nation,” the video shows, saying Trump, with graphics splashing around with things like “the hour has come.”

Oddly enough, this is a real thing Trump said, but it was from his infamous first inauguration on January 20, 2017. The video ended with a graphic of the United States with the date January 20, 2021 and the slogan QAnon WWG1WGA, which stands for Where We Go One, We Go All.

There was also content on Speak like this post from Milo Yiannopoulos, a far-right troll who was booted from Twitter in 2016 for harassment.

Speaking belongs in part to Fox News personality Dan Bongino, a fact that was never mentioned during Matze’s interview with Bartiromo on Sunday. Talking also took money from Rebekah Mercer, a far-right financier of pro-Trump radicalism. Mercer is also the daughter of Robert Mercer, co-founder of Cambridge Analytica.

While Matze’s business is clearly fighting for its life, Parler is also likely suffering from mismanagement. You see, Matze is not the brightest bulb, as they say. When Matze described how he felt on Sunday, he summed it up well.

“It’s not just scary, it’s actually extremely scary,” Matze said.

Correction: This article originally included a typo in QAnon’s tagline. The real slogan is “Where we go one, we all go” and not “Where we go one, we do everything,” a much more fun slogan if we’re honest. Gizmodo regrets the error.