Shunned social media site Parler Inc.’s demand to be reinstated on Amazon Web Services Inc.’s cloud hosting platform was thrown out today by a Washington judge.

Judge Barbara Rothstein said today that after a hearing last week, she has declined to grant Parler a preliminary injunction in its lawsuit against Amazon, saying it had provided “dwindlingly slight” evidence for its antitrust complaint and that it “failed to allege basic facts” regarding Amazon’s alleged improper business activity.

The ruling does not resolve the case as it’s just the first step in the legal process, but it doesn’t bode well for Parler’s chances of winning.

“Parler’s allegations at this time are both inaccurate and unsupported, and are disputed by evidence submitted by [Amazon Web Services],” Rothstein wrote in the order. As such, Parler will need to find another web host or stay offline while it continues its legal battle with Amazon.

Rothstein also rejected Parler’s claims that the suspension would cause it devastating financial harm. Further, she pointed out that Parler didn’t deny that its users had posted threats urging violence on its platform before and during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by former President Donald Trump’s supporters.

She said that although Parler had promised to change its policies, granting an injunction that would force Amazon to reinstate the company would “interfere with AWS’s ability to prevent its services from being used to promote — and, as the events of January 6, 2021 have demonstrated, even cause — violence.”

Parler has proven popular with Trump supporters and members of the alt-right because its platform is more lightly moderated compared with the likes of Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. But after the attack by Trump’s supporters on the Capitol, Amazon decided to boot Parler off of its servers. That came after Parler’s app was pulled from Apple Inc.’s and Google LLC’s app stores.

Parler hit back with a lawsuit, saying Amazon had banned it because of “political animus” and also made the somewhat odd claim that Amazon was trying to protect Twitter, which it sees as its main rival and also uses AWS. Amazon responded by saying it had booted Parler after it disregarded numerous warnings about the violent content hosted on its platform.

“We made our concerns known to Parler over a number of weeks and during that time we saw a significant increase in this type of dangerous content,” a spokesperson said last week. That included detailed calls to violence against teachers, professional athletes, Black and Jewish people, and a swath of specific politicians and tech executives.

For now, Parler’s future remains uncertain. Analysts have said that the company will struggle to find a new host for its platform, and although Parler’s home page currently states that it will “resolve any challenge before us,” the service remains offline.

Image: Parler