Parler urged a U.S. judge on Thursday to order Amazon.com Inc to restore the company’s account, saying Amazon had no evidence the social media platform was used to incite last week’s storming of the U.S. Capitol.
Elizabeth Culliford and Jonathan Stempel for Reuters:
At a hearing in Seattle federal court, Parler’s lawyer, David Groesbeck, said the company would suffer irreparable harm if forced to close and that keeping it alive served the public interest.
“Millions of law-abiding Americans have had their voices silenced,” Groesbeck told U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein. “There is no evidence, other than some anecdotal press references, that Parler was involved in inciting the riots.”
Amazon Web Services cut off Parler on Sunday night, saying Parler had shrugged off repeated warnings to remove violent content… Parler said Amazon had no contractual right to pull the plug and did so in a politically motivated bid to benefit Twitter Inc, a larger Amazon client that Parler said did not censor violent content targeting conservatives.
Parler wants a temporary court order that it be restored to Amazon’s servers while it litigates. Rothstein said she would rule “as quickly as possible.”
MacDailyNews Note: Judge Barbara Rothstein is a Senior United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington. On December 3, 1979, Rothstein was nominated by President Jimmy Carter to a new seat on the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington. She was confirmed by the United States Senate on February 20, 1980.
In February 1990, Judge Rothstein famously struck down as unconstitutional a law enacted by Congress that forbade any desecration of the flag, intended to outlaw flag burning.
In her decision, Judge Rothstein wrote, in part, “The freedom of speech enshrined in our First Amendment is the crucial foundation without which other democratic values cannot flourish.”