Parler CEO: Big Tech Bans are an 'Assault on Everybody'
Popular alternative social media platform goes offline after Apple & Amazon's purge
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Parler CEO Mark Matze has slammed Big Tech's efforts to shut down his popular social media alternative app, blasting the moves as an "assault on everybody."
His comments come after Amazon joined Google and Apple in blocking Parler from their servers, causing the website and app to go offline.
"It's devastating is what it is," Matze told Fox News' Sunday Morning Futures.
"They all work together to make sure at the same time we would lose access to not only our apps, but they're actually shutting all of our servers off tonight, off the internet."
Matze said the suspensions were aimed at decimating the free speech-focused platform he founded for refusing to monitor its content.
"They made an attempt to not only kill the app but to actually destroy the entire company," he said.
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"And it's not just these three companies," Matze continued.
"Every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers all ditched us too on the same day."
Parler has disappeared from the web and vanished from the Apple and Google app stores after tech giants cut ties with the platform in the wake of the riots at the US Capitol last week.
Parler went offline shortly after 3 am EST after Amazon booted the platform off its web hosting service, effectively shutting it down until it can find a new hosting partner.
The platform has been hailed by President Donald Trump's supporters as a conservative-friendly alternative to Twitter.
The site was accused by Apple, Google, and Amazon of continuing to allow messages inciting violence after it refused to censor speech on the platform.
Parler was the most-downloaded app in the Apple store a day after Twitter permanently suspended Trump's account on Friday - before both Apple and Google cut off its access to their app stores.
CEO John Matze warned in his final post before the 3 am deadline that "we will likely be down longer than expected."
"Amazon's, Google's and Apple's statements to the press about dropping our access has caused most of our other vendors to drop their support for us as well," he said.
"Parler is my final stand on the Internet.
"I won't be making an account on any social. Parler is my home."
Matze argued the Silicon Valley leaders are "trying to falsely claim that we're somehow responsible for the events that occurred on the 6th.
"We've never allowed [violence] on our platform," he said.
"And we don't even have a way to coordinate an event on our platform.
"They somehow want to make us responsible.
"This seems to me like an excuse to just basically eliminate free speech at a convenient time for them."
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Rep Devin Nunes (R-CA) also appeared on Sunday Morning Futures and said that the tech giants' suspension of Parler is "clearly a violation" of antitrust, civil rights, and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.
Nunes called for a federal investigation as he compared Amazon, Apple and Google to "the Mafia" and lamented that "Republicans have no way to communicate" without Parler.
"I have three million followers on Parler," he said.
"Tonight, I will no longer be able to communicate with those people."
"The effect of this is that there is no longer a free and open social media company or site for any American to get on any longer," he said.
"Because these big companies, Apple, Amazon, Google, they have just destroyed what was likely a billion-dollar company. Poof, it's gone.
"It's more than just the financial aspects of that," Nunes added.
"It doesn't matter if you're Republican or conservative.
"If you don't want to be regulated by left-wingers that are at Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, where you get shadowbanned, nobody gets to see you.
"They get to decide what's violent or not violent."
"I don't know where the hell the Department of Justice is right now, or the FBI," he said.
"This is clearly a violation of anti-trust, civil rights, the RICO statute.
"There should be a racketeering investigation on all the people that coordinated this attack on not only a company but on all of those like us, like me."
"Unlike the fake social media sites, Parler is actually a very, very safe platform," Nunes concluded.
