Pity Parler 3: Amazon Brings the Receipts in Lawsuit Filing

Andrew Donaldson

Born and raised in West Virginia, Andrew has since lived and traveled around the world several times over. Though frequently writing about politics out of a sense of duty and love of country, most of the time he would prefer discussions on history, culture, occasionally nerding on aviation, and his amateur foodie tendencies. He can usually be found misspelling/misusing words on Twitter @four4thefire and his food writing website Yonder and Home. Andrew is the host of Heard Tell podcast. Subscribe to Andrew's Heard Tell SubStack for free here:

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17 Responses

  1. Oscar Gordon says:

    I fully expect Parler to start data mining Twitter looking for instances of threats that Twitter ignored.Report

    • I suspect Parler does not have the resources for a protracted legal fight hereReport

      • Oscar Gordon in reply to Andrew Donaldson says:

        Depends on how much money their backers want to throw at this.Report

        • Dave in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

          Trust me, it will all be money thrown down a rathole.

          The ToS agreements are clear in that the determination of a violation is made by Amazon in accordance with the language in its agreement.

          That Twitter chose to ignore certain instances that Amazon did not is legally irrelevant, especially if the violations are clear under the agreement Parler signed. This all falls on the interpretation of the language in the agreement and that language is crystal clear.

          Honestly, this is almost worse than the election fraud lawsuit and that’s saying a lot. I’m no lawyer but I deal with legal issues all the time and the idea that a counterparty to a mega-company’s canned legal language thinks it has an out here is insane, especially when you consider that Amazon would have gotten sign off from both inside and outside counsel on this one.Report

          • Oscar Gordon in reply to Dave says:

            How much money was just burned up trying to overturn the election.

            These folks aren’t being rational, I expect them to burn money.Report

            • Doctor Jay in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

              I actually believe that the people who run Parler are grifters, and are perfectly rational.

              That’s why Parler appears to have been built on the super-cheap side, leading to all the publicized weak security.

              They were trying to capitalize on a short-term dissatisfaction with Twitter, and they did not expect it to last a long time. Just make hay while the sun shines.

              So the suit looks like PR, not an actual legal challenge. “We are fighting this!” is the pose.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Doctor Jay says:

                You mean the whole, hey, look, we changed an admin password, made tons of new admin accounts, and basically sucked every post, video, etc. off the site for off-site archive?Report

              • JS in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                IIRC, they didn’t even have to do that.

                Parler used a ID system for posts that simply incremented by 1 for each new post. And then used a deletion flag, rather than deleting posts (it turns posts to “do not show” rather than “delete”). And then didn’t bother stripping picture and video metadata.

                So to archive all of Parler simply required writing a web-scraper that bypassed Parler’s own UI, in order to request every post by ID (starting at 0) until you stopped getting post.

                Which…people did. Wasn’t hard. Anyone who has ever written a web crawler could write the script to do it.

                You would get everything, included deleted posts, because the “don’t show this post it’s deleted” flag was interpreted by the Parler interface to not show.

                Of course on top of that, I have no doubt AWS has archival copies of Parler going back months and months.

                If the FBI wants everything Parler had related to the Capitol Hill riots, they can subpoena Parler and AWS, and they’ll get it all. Every post, photo, and video — complete with GPS coordinates and other metadata.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to JS says:

                LMFAO!Report

              • Philip H in reply to Doctor Jay says:

                That’s sure how the President operates . . .Report

    • To what end? IIRC, Twitter operates its own hardware and system software platform. An option that was available to Parler, aside from the fact that it’s a hell of a lot of work and up-front money compared to leasing virtual resources from AWS or Azure.Report

      • Oscar Gordon in reply to Michael Cain says:

        Honestly, I have no idea, it’s just seems like the next logical move, to try and show AWS is being inconsistent.

        I mean, the initial lawsuit had accusations of anti-trust, and was not filed correctly, so it seems we are looking at legal arguments maybe slightly better than Rudy and Sydney, but not much?Report

  2. Saul Degraw says:

    The other option is that Parler sincerely thinks all this stuff should be hosted freely because its owners also believe in the content of the message. The far-right Mercer family is one of the money groups behind Parler.Report

  3. LeeEsq says:

    The current constitutional consensus on Free Speech was based on mid-20th century broadcast and other media technology. Now most people have more broadcast power in their pocket than Walter Cronkite could dream of. I’m not sure if the constitutional consensus can survive this unless people are willing to deal with a lot of potential disorder and really messy politics as a side effect.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to LeeEsq says:

      They’re going to get potential disorder and really messy politics no matter what.

      The question is whether The Powers That Be will be able to deftly say “those are the old rules, we now operate under *NEW* rules” or if they’ll pull something half as clumsy as the distinctions made between punching up vs. punching down.Report

  4. Karen Grube says:

    The threats and violence Twitter won’t police! This response was complete hypocrisy because Twitter is partnering with AWS on some projects.

    https://t.co/dsusG1cpE9?amp=1Report