https://www.npr.org/2021/01/21/956486352/judge-refuses-to-reinstate-parler-after-amazon-shut-it-down

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Judge Refuses To Reinstate Parler After Amazon Shut It Down U.S.
District Judge Barbara Rothstein sided with Amazon, which argued that
Parler would not remove posts from its site that threatened public
safety in the wake of the Capitol riot.
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Judge Refuses To Reinstate Parler After Amazon Shut It Down

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Judge Refuses To Reinstate Parler After Amazon Shut It Down 3:54

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Judge Refuses To Reinstate Parler After Amazon Shut It Down

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January 21, 20213:14 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
Bobby Allyn

Bobby Allyn

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Judge Refuses To Reinstate Parler After Amazon Shut It Down

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Even before Amazon booted Parler off its Web service, Apple and
Google had banned it from their respective app stores. Jaap Arriens/
NurPhoto via Getty Images hide caption

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Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Even before Amazon booted Parler off its Web service, Apple and
Google had banned it from their respective app stores.

Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Updated at 5:50 p.m. ET

A federal judge has refused to restore the social media site Parler
after Amazon kicked the company off of its Web-hosting services over
content seen as inciting violence.

The decision is a blow to Parler, an upstart that has won over Trump
loyalists for its relatively hands-off approach to moderating
content. The company sued Amazon over its ban, demanding
reinstatement.

U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein sided with Amazon, which argued
that Parler would not take down posts that threatened public safety
even in the wake of the attack on the U.S. Capitol and that it is
within Amazon's rights to punish the company over its refusal.

"The Court rejects any suggestion that the public interest favors
requiring AWS to host the incendiary speech that the record shows
some of Parler's users have engaged in. At this stage, on the showing
made thus far, neither the public interest nor the balance of
equities favors granting an injunction in this case," Rothstein wrote
on Thursday.

Parler's looser rules of engagement also attracted far-right
activists among the some 15 million users who, the company says,
posted messages before Amazon pulled the plug.

That anything-goes philosophy ran headlong into demands that social
media platforms be held accountable for allowing rioters to discuss
plans to storm the Capitol on the day Congress was certifying
President Biden's election.

Shortly after the Jan. 6 attack, Parler began to feel the squeeze.
First, Google and Apple banned it from its app stores, which made it
nearly impossible to download the app. Then Amazon's Web-hosting
services, Amazon Web Services, terminated Parler's account.

Parler filed a lawsuit, arguing that Amazon's crackdown was driven by
"political animus." Parler contended that the tech giant was abusing
its power and attempting to kneecap a competitor.

In submissions to the court, Parler said Amazon's severing ties
threatened Parler with "extinction."

A lawyer for Parler wrote that the last six Web hosts the company has
approached have refused to work with the site.

Yet the website recently flicked back on as essentially no more than
a welcome page. It promised to return soon with the message: "We will
not let civil discourse perish!"

Amazon Says Parler Systematically Unwilling To Remove Violent Content

Insurrection At The Capitol: Live Updates

Amazon Says Parler Systematically Unwilling To Remove Violent Content

Judge: Amazon does not have to host 'abusive, violent content'

In defending against the suit, Amazon considered the matter a simple
case of breach of contract. The company flagged dozens of posts
advocating violence, which is against its policies, and Parler failed
to remove the posts, according to Amazon's attorneys. The posts cited
by Amazon include violent threats directed at Twitter's Jack Dorsey,
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and leaders in the Democratic Party.

In defending its decision to boot Parler off its Web services, Amazon
pointed to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the
much-debated 1996 federal law that prevents people from suing
Internet companies over what users post.

Technology

Web Hosts, Services Connecting Websites To The Internet, Gain More
Power

The law also lets tech companies create and enforce rules over what
is allowed and not allowed on their sites.

"That is precisely what AWS did here: removed access to content it
considered 'excessively violent' and 'harassing,'" attorneys for
Amazon wrote in its submission to the court.

In her opinion, Rothstein agreed with Amazon, ruling that Parler's
antitrust claim is "dwindlingly slight" and that the breach of
contract argument "failed." She wrote that it was Parler, not Amazon,
that violated the terms of the contract.

She pointed to the rioters who stormed the Capitol and documented
their violent acts on Parler.

"The Court explicitly rejects any suggestion that the balance of
equities or the public interest favors obligating AWS to host the
kind of abusive, violent content at issue in this case, particularly
in light of the recent riots at the U.S. Capitol," Rothstein wrote.
"That event was a tragic reminder that inflammatory rhetoric can --
more swiftly and easily than many of us would have hoped -- turn a
lawful protest into a violent insurrection."

Facebook Removes 'Stop The Steal' Content; Twitter Suspends QAnon
Accounts

Insurrection At The Capitol: Live Updates

Facebook Removes 'Stop The Steal' Content; Twitter Suspends QAnon
Accounts

Rothstein did not dismiss the lawsuit outright, but rather rejected
Parler's request for a preliminary injunction. That said, the
decision does not bode well for the future of Parler's legal fight.

Parler officials did not return a request for comment.

David Groesbeck, a lawyer representing Parler, wrote that the
company's hope that it could quickly find a new Web-hosting service
has not come to fruition, creating a dire situation that Parler's CEO
has said could spell the death of the site.

"The notoriety and fallout from the break-up have driven away current
and potential business partners, utterly frustrating Parler's
pre-termination plans to quickly replace and recover from AWS,"
Groesbeck wrote in a recent filing.

Parler, which is funded in part by Rebekah Mercer, a major donor of
former President Donald Trump, has discussed housing its own servers
and supporting its own Web hosting. Trump, too, floated the idea of
launching his own social media service after Twitter permanently
suspended him.

Disinformation researchers said Amazon's shutdown of Parler
eliminated a key gathering place for the sharing and discussion of
the election-related conspiracies that Trump has often fanned.

Conservatives Flock To Mercer-Funded Parler, Claim Censorship On
Facebook And Twitter

Technology

Conservatives Flock To Mercer-Funded Parler, Claim Censorship On
Facebook And Twitter

"The reason why we're experiencing this corporate denial of service
is because there are really no other levers possible to stop this
group of people from reassembling and either trying this again or
trying something else that's just as dangerous," said Joan Donovan,
an expert on online extremism at Harvard. "It's going to be really
important that when they make these decisions, they stick and that
they don't walk them back once the heat is off."

A new focus on who controls 'the guts of the web'

To experts who study online speech and infrastructure, the
predicament Parler finds itself in reveals just how much control over
the Internet is vested in web hosts, an out-of-sight part of the web
that has the power to decide which sites live or die.

"The guts of the web that no one ever wants to see, or deal with, or
think about," is how Greg Falco, a cyber risk management researcher
at Stanford University, describes these service providers. "It is
critical infrastructure for our society, but it's been pushed behind
a curtain."

In recent months, the biggest social media companies have drawn
brighter lines around the limits of online free speech. And in the
wake of the attack on the U.S. Capitol, they've taken
uncharacteristically aggressive actions against groups and accounts
that glorified the violence.

But, as the case of Parler shows, the pressure on social media
companies to police the speech on their platforms is shared by
web-hosting companies.

"The question becomes tricky: When do you actually take someone down?
It's a really gray territory," Falco said. "The reality is, it comes
down to understanding when it reaches some public attention, when
there's actually some physical implications."

It is hard to find an example more stark than the insurrection
attempt on the Capitol, when droves of rioters turned to Parler and
other alternative sites to post videos of vandalism, property damage
and other violence, as ProPublica recently documented at length.

"When you have something that's outwardly violent or causes some
other crisis or tragedy in the world, that's when web infrastructure
tends to come out of the shadows," said Dave Temkin, a former Netflix
executive who oversaw the management of the company's servers.

Web hosting companies, like social media platforms, address content
in their terms of service. Violators can be punished.

Back in 2018, GoDaddy, a major player in site-hosting, kicked Gab
offline after it was revealed that the man who killed 11 people at a
Pittsburgh synagogue had posted anti-semitic messages to the site.
Gab, which removed the shooter's account, came back online with the
help of Epik, a company with links to the neo-Nazi website the Daily
Stormer and theDonald.win, a far-right discussion board that was
created after Reddit banned a forum popular with Trump's most ardent
fans. The site recently rebranded as Patriot.win and Epik supports
its domain, the company confirmed.

Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard's Law School, predicts more
battles over online speech will erupt between sites that choose to be
hands off and web hosts that demand a more aggressive stance. And
that troubles her.

"Is that the right place for content moderation to be occurring?"
Douek said. "It's harder to bring accountability to those choices
when we don't even know who's making them or why they're being made."

In other words, when a web host has a problem with content on a
client's site, usually these discussions are hashed out between the
two parties, far from the public light. And web hosts, unlike social
media platforms, are not used to publicly explaining these decisions.

Another issue, Douek said, is the lack of oversight of web hosts. She
pointed to the 98 pieces of objectionable content Amazon cited in
court papers about Parler.

"It sort of made me laugh a little bit," she said. "Has Amazon read
the rest of the Internet? Ninety-eight pieces of content or whatever
is not that many. I mean, has Amazon read Amazon?"

Editor's note: Amazon is among NPR's recent financial supporters.

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