Apple
Amazon
Banned
Apps
Government
US Election 2020Apple removed the Parler app (a Twitter alternative) from the App Store the day after the app was removed from the Google Play Store. This move from Apple came a few days after the rioting in the US capitol, and after Parler saw record traffic due to Twitter and Facebook banning President Trump. An Apple spokesperson gave a statement that included the following:
Parler has not taken adequate measures to address the proliferation of these threats to people’s safety. We have suspended Parler from the App Store until they resolve these issues.
Towards the end of the day, Amazon announced that they would be terminating Parler’s servers on Amazon Web Services (AWS). John Matze, the CEO of Parler, made the following statement:
Sunday (tomorrow) at midnight Amazon will be shutting off all of our servers in an attempt to completely remove free speech off the internet. There is the possibility Parler will be unavailable on the internet for up to a week as we rebuild from scratch. We prepared for events like this by never relying on amazons proprietary infrastructure and building bare metal products.
We will try our best to move to a new provider right now as we have many competing for our business, however Amazon, Google and Apple purposefully did this as a coordinated effort knowing our options would be limited and knowing this would inflict the most damage right as President Trump was banned from the tech companies.
This was a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the market place. We were too successful too fast. You can expect the war on competition and free speech to continue, but don’t count us out.
#speakfreely