Big Tech corporations worked in concert this past January to deplatform Parler, a fast-growing social network friendly to conservatives. Parler’s vendors, such as Amazon Web Services, bowed to influential ideological forces and weaponized their Terms of Service, basing their actions on the expectation that Parler could not moderate content to AWS’s satisfaction on a timely basis (a subjective standard impossible for any company of any size to meet).
When AWS enforced their evolving “content moderation” policies on Parler, with maximum consequences, the entire tech industry realized they could do it to anyone. Watching AWS and partners’ arbitrary enforcement against specifically and only Parler, while ignoring the many other offenders they host, highlighted the vulnerabilities any conservative company reliant upon the “cloud” faces.