Parler Goes Dark For Now, Twitter Braces For Possible Protest At HQ

Parler went offline early Monday morning, just after midnight on the West Coast.

Late Saturday, Amazon announced that it would remove the controversial right-wing social platform from its cloud hosting service, Amazon Web Services, by 11:59 PM Pacific time on Sunday, because of repeated violations of the platform’s rules. Amazon flagged 98 instances of posts on the app that "clearly encourage and incite violence."

Prior to Amazon’s announcement, both Apple and Google removed Parler from their app stores, citing the platform’s failure to stem user posts encouraging violence.

As Facebook and Twitter have become somewhat tougher about policing calls for violence and dangerous conspiracy theories — including the lie that Joe Biden did not fairly win the national election — Parler has become the de facto platform for many Trump supporters.

On Sunday, Parler’s CEO John Matze, told The New York Times that he was “racing to save the data of Parler’s roughly 15 million users from Amazon’s computers. He was also calling company after company to find one willing to support Parler with hundreds of computer servers.”

On Monday morning, Matze said in a statement cited by CNBC that his app will be down "longer than expected." 

"This is not due to software restrictions — we have our software and everyone’s data ready to go," he added. "Rather it’s that 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. Most people with enough servers to host us have shut their doors to us. We will update everyone and update the press when we are back online.”

In a post late Saturday, Matze, who has claimed that Parler does not condone or accept violence, had accused Amazon, Google and Apple of working together to “try and ensure they don’t have competition.”

He repeated his claim that Parler is dedicated to “free speech and free information” and vowed that it would be back, although it would likely shut down “for up to a week as we rebuild from scratch.”

Separately, San Francisco police are preparing for a possible pro-Trump demonstration on Monday at Twitter's headquarters in response to Twitter's having banned Trump from its platform as of last Friday.

The building has been more or less empty since workers were sent home to work when the pandemic began early last year.

A spokesperson told Yahoo News that the San Francisco Police Department has been in contact with representatives from Twitter and will have "sufficient resources available to respond to any demonstrations as well as calls for service citywide." The department is "committed to facilitating the public’s right to First Amendment expressions of free speech" and asks "that everyone exercising their First Amendment rights be considerate, respectful, and mindful of the safety of others," the email added.

5 comments about "Parler Goes Dark For Now, Twitter Braces For Possible Protest At HQ".
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  1. Dan Ciccone from STACKED Entertainment, January 11, 2021 at 12:29 p.m.

    It's interesting that MP continues to refer to "right wing" media outlets or "right wing" social platforms, but never refers to "left wing" media outlets or "left wing" social platforms.  Why is that?

  2. D L from TBD, January 11, 2021 at 12:39 p.m.

    Because when a news outlet peddles lies and conspiracy without fairness or decency, they are not reporting facts and objective news. That makes them against the norm. So, that needs to be called out in reference to them. Also: social platforms are private companies and can make whatever rules they choose; you agree to their Terms of Service when you sign up. So, again, when you create a platform that goes against the norm, it has to be labeled as such.

  3. Karlene Lukovitz from MediaPost, January 12, 2021 at 5:25 a.m.

    FYI, Daily Beast described as "left-wing" in a different MP article on same day: https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/359443/report-fox-news-presentation-aimed-to-reassure-ad.html?edition=121040
    But now that you mention it, for accuracy's sake, I really should've described Parler as "far-right" or better yet, "radical right."

  4. Gwyneth Llewelyn from Beta Technologies, January 18, 2022 at 4:10 p.m.

    Uh, no, actually they didn't use any Russian cloud services. Instead, they went to a small, brand new ISP, established in Santa Fe, NM, a few days after this article was written — Compunex LLC.

    Interestingly enough, compunex.net seems to be a parked domain by GoDaddy. But GoDaddy was just used to register the name. The actual DNS is handled by WildWestDomains, from Tempe, AZ. They have set it up so that the email address admin@compunex.net (that's the one used for the official registration at ARIN) is actually being served by Microsoft. Microsoft handles secure email for gazillions of companies, so that's not very suspicious. Also, they have pointed the web address to Google Cloud — again, Google provides web services to gazillions of companies, so, again, this is, by itself, not very suspicious.

    Nevertheless, if they ever had a web page (I suspect they haven't), especially one hosted by Google, it would show up on the Wayback Machine. Well, there are four snapshots there: none work (blank/error pages), but it's interesting to see that the oldest is from 2013 or so, years before Compunex LLC was founded! 

    So... we have a brand-new ISP that was legally registered four days after this article appeared... and which quickly established the relevant nitty-gritty details to set themselves up as a bona fide provider, obtaining the required links, and registering themselves with ARIN to get a block of addresses. But instead of using their own addresses for their own domain, they opted instead to use Microsoft for email, and Google for web... but seemed to never have placed anything online, and, in the meantime, the domain name is being offered through a GoDaddy mediator (due to expire early in February 2022).

    GoDaddy, of course, only reveals the registration data their customer allowed them to provide. You can however clearly see that the compunex.net domain name was acquired by... Parler! (see https://www.godaddy.com/whois/results.aspx?domainName=compunex.net). Fun, isn't it?

    GoDaddy obviously has more information on the domain name, but this is only disclosed under a special agreement, which we, normal human beings, can hardly sign. On the other hand, a curious journalist might be successful in doing so (wink, wink) and eventually figure things out...

  5. Gwyneth Llewelyn from Beta Technologies replied, January 18, 2022 at 4:11 p.m.

    (cont.)

    What I suspect is that Parler has done the following: unable to find anyone willing to host their services, they decided to launch their own ISP, and set up a few servers somewhere in New Mexico. To make sure that they wouldn't be pestered by legal details, they looked for a nice-sounding domain name that was parked by GoDaddy, and bought it cheap. 'Old' domains are actually valuable — because of spamming issues, mailservers around the world will promptly block anything 'new' — so that name was a good catch. Because they have to have a valid email address, or else they won't get the proper registration codes to set themselves up as an independent ISP, they only set one address up, and didn't even host it themselves, but got it from Microsoft's secure services — it's cheap, and if they get bombarded with requests, these will be handled by Microsoft, not by Compunex! For the same reason, they placed their useless web server on Google Cloud — because obviously they would become, sooner or later, the target of all hacker activists around the globe. So that became Google's problem instead. And if Google decides to stop their service, who cares; it's not as if Compunex is a 'real' ISP, providing services to anyone else but... Parler. The less they draw attention to Compunex, the more likely Parler will remain up and running...

    Very cleverly done, indeed.

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