Parler sues Amazon for suspending app from cloud service, claims antitrust violation and breach of contract

Alternative social media platform Parler filed a lawsuit against Amazon on Monday following Amazon Web Services' decision to suspend Parler from its cloud hosting service following last week's deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Parler is seeking a temporary restraining order to keep Amazon Web Services (AWS) from blackballing Parler and claims Amazon Web Services is violating the Sherman Antitrust Act in the filing.

SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM PARLER GOES DARK AFTER AMAZON CLOUD SUSPENSION

"AWS’s decision to effectively terminate Parler’s account is apparently motivated by political animus," Parler claims in its filing. "AWS is violating Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act in combination with Defendant Twitter. AWS is also breaching it[s] contract with Parler, which requires AWS to provide Parler with a thirty-day notice before terminating service, rather than the less than thirty-hour notice AWS actually provided. Finally, AWS is committing intentional interference with prospective economic advantage given the millions of users expected to sign up in the near future."

Parler claims that it is being discriminated against because it is in direct competition with social media giant Twitter.

"Last month, Defendant Amazon Web Services, Inc. (“AWS”) and the popular social media platform Twitter signed a multi-year deal so that AWS could support the daily delivery of millions of tweets. AWS currently provides that same service to Parler, a conservative microblogging alternative and competitor to Twitter," the filing reads.

"When Twitter announced two evenings ago that it was permanently banning President Trump from its platform, conservative users began to flee Twitter en masse for Parler. The exodus was so large that the next day, yesterday, Parler became the number one free app downloaded from Apple’s App Store."

An Amazon Web Services spokesperson told Fox News there is "no merit" to Parler's claims.

“AWS provides technology and services to customers across the political spectrum, and we respect Parler’s right to determine for itself what content it will allow," the spokesperson said in a statement. "However, it is clear that there is significant content on Parler that encourages and incites violence against others, and that Parler is unable or unwilling to promptly identify and remove this content, which is a violation of our terms of service. We made our concerns known to Parler over a number of weeks and during that time we saw a significant increase in this type of dangerous content, not a decrease, which led to our suspension of their services Sunday evening.”

Parler went dark early Monday following AWS' decision to suspend Parler from its cloud hosting service.

During an interview on "Mornings with Maria" on Monday, CEO John Matze told users to "hold on and come back" as the company figures out how to move forward.

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"Nobody has presented any credible piece of information or evidence that, you know, there is anything problems on Parler that don’t exist on other platforms," Matze said. "This really is a double standard. ... We see all sorts of nasty threatening content on Twitter, much more of it actually, in our opinion, and, actually, a lot of content that’s deleted from Parler still remains on Twitter to this day in the form of screenshots. So I don’t understand, you know, what this is really about. Because it is not about holding everybody to account equally. It is about giving preferential treatment to certain people."

The suit comes as Google and Apple have also taken action against Parler in the wake of a pro-Trump riot at the U.S. Capitol, suspending it from their app store Friday due to a failure to moderate "egregious content" posted by users related to the violent siege last week.

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FOX Business' inquiry to Parler was not immediately returned.

FOX Business' Talia Kaplan, Audrey Conklin, James Leggate and Brittany De Lea contributed to this report.