The alternative messaging app Parler sued Amazon in the District Court of Seattle for removing its app from the Amazon Web Services store, claiming the the tech giant was acting on a politically motivated double standard that it did not apply to the more maintstream Twitter.
“AWS’s decision to effectively terminate Parler’s account is apparently motivated by political animus,” the eighteen-page lawsuit reads. “It is also apparently designed to reduce competition in the microblogging services market to the benefit of Twitter.”
Parler told the court that the mater is a time-sensitive case, as they are seeing a sharp increase in downloads and need to capitalize on the trend.
Parler's user base expanded by 825,000 installs from the Apple and Google stores between Wednesday and Sunday, a more than 1,000 percent increase from the same period a week earlier, according to The Hill.
AWS, Google, and Apple have all removed Parler from their stores, making it effectively inaccessible form the bulk of Americans, after it was used to coordinate and incite demonstrations against Joe Biden's victory. The worst of these was the recent Capitol Riots, which left several people dead.
Amazon, for its part, has said that Parler is not adequately moderating calls to violence or terrorism, sending the app nearly one hundred examples of such posts along with a letter explaining that the app had been removed.