There seems to be a lot of confusion over what the First Amendment provides in terms of free speech: It's pretty simple - it just says that the *government* is not allowed to suppress speech. That's it.

As far as AWS dropping Parler, Amazon had no obligation to do more than notifying a customer that they were out of ToS compliance. Parler could have backed everything up a month before when they were first notified.

Good news: most posts are on the Internet Archive and are potentially recoverable as Parler didn't bother to secure their API access and labeled posts in a predictable format (sequential numbers) making it easy to be scraped. They saw the ban coming when Parler chose not to. At a minimum, they could have swept a copy to Glacier under a different account as soon as they were notified.

Bad news: those posts are accessible to the public, including law enforcement.

If you were in the mob assaulting the Capitol on Jan 6, and posted your intentions on Parler, you've just made it much easier for your prosecutor to show criminal intent .