Parler files new lawsuit against Amazon

Parler’s new lawsuit alleges a host of contractual offenses, as well as deceptive and unfair trade practices and defamation

Social network Parler lobbed a new lawsuit against Amazon in King County Superior Court, two weeks after its relaunch rendered moot its original accusation in federal court that Amazon had effectively killed its business.

The move, Amazon attorneys said in a filing Wednesday kicking the suit back to federal court, is “an extreme attempt to forum shop.” After a federal judge last month denied Parler’s request that she force Amazon to reconnect the social network to its cloud-computing services, Parler, Amazon contends, is seeking a new hearing before a new judge in “a transparent effort to evade this Court’s dim view of the merits of Parler’s claims. But Parler’s scheme is futile.”

Parler’s new lawsuit, filed late Tuesday, alleges a host of contractual offenses, as well as deceptive and unfair trade practices and defamation. The complaint casts Parler as a “victim of Amazon’s efforts to destroy an up-and-coming technology through deceptive, defamatory, anticompetitive, and bad faith conduct.” Parler is seeking unspecified monetary damages.

Parler’s original lawsuit, filed in January in Seattle’s federal District Court, contained largely “the same nucleus of facts,” Amazon wrote in its filing Wednesday: Billed primarily as an antitrust action, that suit accused Amazon of collaborating with Twitter to sink Parler’s business. Parler voluntarily dismissed that suit late Tuesday, an hour before a court-imposed deadline to file an amended complaint in the case.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Seattle tech giant’s cloud-computing division, stopped working with Parler in January over what Amazon said was Parler’s inability to moderate violent content of the kind that spurred supporters of former President Donald Trump to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

Parler, which bills itself as an unmoderated alternative to Twitter, has been linked to the insurrection by media reports and federal charging documents indicating Parler users participated in the deadly riot. Parler has said AWS did not express concern about its content moderation practices until after the Capitol riot.

Though, Parler said that Amazon’s primary motivation in pulling the plug on its services was in support of Twitter, a new AWS client. Parler has said in court filings that after Twitter banned Trump, he considered starting an account on Parler, which could have siphoned many of his 90 million followers from Twitter to Parler.

Parler has also argued in its new suit that the problematic content Amazon presented as a rationale for taking it off the web represented only a minuscule fraction of all posts and comments on Parler. Banning Parler from AWS for hosting problematic content is hypocritical, given the amount of merchandise for sale on Amazon.com that promotes or glorifies violence, the suit said.

There is no merit to these claims, an AWS spokesperson said in a statement. As shown by the evidence in Parler’s federal lawsuit, it was clear that there was significant content on Parler that encouraged and incited violence against others, which is a violation of our terms of service.