Parler CEO John Matze said that Big Tech companies never indicated that their threats were “deadly serious” until right before his company was pulled from platforms such as Amazon and Apple.
“It’s very, very interesting that they all, on the exact same day without previously indicating, they never indicated to us that there was any serious or material problem with our app,” Matze told host Mark Levin in an interview that will air Sunday evening. “But on the same day, you know, all on the same day, they send us these very threatening notices.”
“So we said, ‘OK, let’s call this. Let’s see what you know, let’s see what Google said. Oh, they actually never emailed us, and we have no way to contact them,'” he added. “OK, so Google is out. Apple … we called our rep, and they basically shrugged it off and made no indication that this was deadly serious, despite … their email being very serious.”
Parler was wiped from Big Tech platforms the weekend after the storming of the Capitol. Amazon, Apple, and Google all removed the app, citing it did not monitor calls for violence effectively.
Parler has been offline since last week, with Matze saying he is still looking for another cloud computing service to get back online.
“It could be never,” he said last week. “We don’t know yet.”
He added, “I am an optimist. It may take days, it may take weeks, but Parler will return, and when we do, we will be stronger.”
Matze and his young family have since gone into hiding after he received death threats.
“Matze himself, as the CEO of the company Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to vilify, has had to leave his home and go into hiding with his family after receiving death threats and invasive personal security breaches,” a newly released court filing from Parler’s legal team reads.
Matze continued in his interview with Levin that Amazon initially signaled there were no issues with his app, and he should not worry about the tech behemoth removing it from its servers.
“And Amazon, as usual, [was] basically saying, ‘Oh, I never saw any material problems. There’s no issues.’ You know, they were played it off very nonchalantly. And so we had still even, you know, on the 8th and the 9th, you know, we had no real indication that this was, you know, deadly serious.”
“You know, our ads were not intrusive. We were not using data to kind of predict people or mine people’s data,” Matze said. “We were presenting ads in a very what I like to describe as humane way so that we were doing what I think is best for ads, which is respecting people’s privacy. We were making tremendous amounts of revenue from organic small businesses and helping them out. And so we’ve proved our model. We proved our growth in the marketplace.”
