The move, Amazon attorneys said in a filing Wednesday moving 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
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
Parler, though, has said that Amazon's primary motivation in pulling the plug on its services was in support of Twitter, a new AWS client. After Twitter banned Trump, Parler has said in court filings, 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."
Amazon's decision to cut ties with Parler temporarily wiped the social network from the web, costing it hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising revenue, the new suit contends. Moreover, Amazon's claims that Parler was "unwilling or unable" to remove problematic content were false, Parler said in its new suit, and had the effect of defaming the website to the extent that other large cloud-computing providers have been unwilling to work with the network.
Parler clambered online two weeks ago, hosted by SkySilk, a
Parler is operating on a smaller scale than it did before the
"Parler has been unable to regain the reputation and success it enjoyed before AWS terminated its services," Parler wrote in its new complaint. "Not surprisingly, when an internet-based company cannot get on the internet, the damage is extraordinary."
In the six weeks that Parler was dormant, it lost "tens of millions of current and prospective users" to other channels, according to the new complaint. The messaging app Gab is one such popular Parler alternative; a hacker collective Monday released a trove of private messages sent on Gab by more than 15,000 users.
As Parler has struggled to return from the sidelines, it has seen an executive shake-up. Former CEO
Parler's legal team has also seen changes. The company was initially represented by
Groesbeck submitted Parler's original complaint one day late because, he said, he had been locked out of his online federal docket account. The mistake cost Parler the opportunity to ask the judge for a temporary restraining order barring Amazon from taking the social network offline.
Groesbeck, though, has taken back seat on Parler's legal team. Three high-powered lawyers have given the court notice that they'll be handling Parler's suit:
Parler's new complaint "is another step in our effort to hold Amazon responsible for falsely attempting to make Parler the scapegoat for the
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