Parler CEO John Matze flipped the script on Amazon, which had accused his platform of inciting violence and removed it from its web services as a result.
Matze and his family have since gone into hiding after reportedly receiving death threats.
Matze accused Amazon Web Services (AWS) of running a “PR campaign” with other tech companies against his company Parler. He said that these companies claimed “falsely, you know — without any evidence really other than a couple of articles that didn’t have any evidence either — that, you know, Parler, somehow, was responsible for inciting violence.” Matze said that such an accusation against his company was “crazy because their statements alone — on the first day that it was released, you know, had over a thousand death threats to our lawyer alone. Our employees are harassed, you know. We’re harassed.”
Matze didn’t mince words during the Jan. 18 edition of Hannity and fired back at Amazon: “[T]he one inciting violence is AWS — Amazon — who incited, you know, economic violence against our company and has, you know, created people who actually want to threaten us and our employees too.”
Watch Matze’s segment on Hannity below:
Fox News host Sean Hannity said that “we’ve got to become the media. That’s the only option we have.” He said that we needed “conservative tech minds that will be able to create a usable platform for you — the equivalent of what you’ve had. Yet, you’re not dependent on Apple or Amazon or any of these other companies moving forward.” Hannity continued: “Now, I understand you're working towards that. How far away do you think you are from making all of that happen?”
Matze responded by saying that Parler’s “first step is to get onto infrastructure — you know, servers, DDoS protection, WAF protection, other tech-related things — that don’t rely on Amazon or any of the other Big Tech companies.” Matze added that Parler had “reached out to over six vendors — all of whom, you know, are capable of hosting us — all of whom said no and cited almost exactly what Amazon cited.” The Parler company “really needs to build our own infrastructure and our own technology,” Matze said.
Matze concluded by blasting Big Tech’s Orwellian crusade against freedom of speech:
I think it needs to be more than just liberal versus conservative. I, myself, am a libertarian. I’m not a conservative. But what I do believe is that we need to have principles that free speech and privacy should be respected, and apparently, that’s too much for Big Tech.
Recent research by the Media Research Center (MRC) has shown that Amazon was being hypocritical in its concern over “violent content” when it allowed at least 204 items promoting violence and hate to be sold on its own platform. One T-shirt with the words “Kill All Republicans” was up for sale on Amazon before being taken down later after being exposed.
In fact, thirteen violent items that were listed by the MRC were removed from Amazon’s platform following MRC’s report. However, 191 of those items still remained, which included riot gear, anti-police merchandise and guillotine keepsakes. Furthermore, more digging revealed shirts made for women and children that glorify the Columbine school shooters.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact Amazon at 1 (888) 280-4331 and demand that it not discriminate against free speech. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
MRC Assistant Editor Corinne Weaver and MRC TechWatch Contributing Writer Alec Schemmel contributed to this report.
