A researcher and activist led an effort to archive more than 99% of content posted on Parler, including the location data of users who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, to hold them accountable for the violence.
The public posts archived by the researcher, who goes by donk_enby on Twitter, has already been used by technology news site Gizmodo to pinpoint the locations of Parler users who attended the Jan. 6 “Save America” protest that ended in a riot at the Capitol. It appears that hundreds of Parler users participated in the protest, and more than a dozen breached the Capitol building during the riot.
Led by donk_enby, activists began archiving Parler posts after the Jan. 6 violence as Twitter and Facebook started to ban President Trump and users who supported the protests. Amazon Web Services announced it would remove Parler from its web hosting service because it allowed violent content. Still, it gave notice to Parler on Jan. 9 before suspending services in the early morning hours of Jan. 11.
Before the Jan. 6 riot, some Parler users had called on people attending to kill lawmakers and police officers. Lin Wood, a lawyer and supporter of Trump, used Parler to call for Vice President Mike Pence’s execution after Pence declined to take steps to overturn the election results of President-elect Joe Biden. Parler did remove Wood’s post calling on Pence to face a firing squad.
“Will you and several hundred more go with me to D.C. and fight our way into the Congress and arrest every Democrat who has participated in this coup?” an Arkansas police chief posted on Parler in November. “We may have to shoot and kill many of the Communist B.L.M. and ANTIFA Democrat foot soldiers to accomplish this!!!”
The person added: “Death to all Marxist Democrats. Take no prisoners, leave no survivors!!”
While there have been dubious claims that all of Parler’s back-end user data has been compromised, including the names and addresses of users, the donk_enby’s archiving effort targeted publicly available posts.
“Only things that were available publicly via the web were archived,” she tweeted. “I don’t have e-mail address, phone, or credit card number unless you posted it yourself on Parler.”
As a “neutral town square” that promotes free speech, Parler CEO John Matze said his service bears no responsibility for the Jan. 6 violence. While critics have accused Parler of failing to remove violent content, Matze has compared Parler to a phone network.
“Apparently [critics] believe Parler is responsible for ALL user-generated content,” he tweeted on Jan. 8. “Therefore. by the same logic, Apple must be responsible for ALL actions taken by their phones. Every car bomb, every illegal cell phone conversation, every crime committed on an iPhone.”
However, donk_enby disagreed.
“You are full of shit and complicit in 4 people’s deaths, which could have easily been more,” she tweeted. “I might have not got along with them due to their political views, but they were still someone’s mother/father/daughter/son/brother/sister. There is no neutral on a moving train.”
The archives of the Parler posts are likely to be used by law enforcement agencies investigating the Capitol riot, said Nick Turner, chief product officer of threat intelligence vendor Echosec Systems.
“Investigations into the Capitol attack are ongoing, and Parler likely hosts many discussions from individuals involved in participating or organizing the incident,” he told the Washington Examiner. “If police hadn’t finished recording evidence before Parler’s shutdown, access to an archive may be their only solution.”
It’s unclear whether evidence from the archive would hold up in court, he added. He also suggested that the archiving activity could run afoul of criminal hacking or privacy laws.
Even so, there is a “great amount” of value for law enforcement officials in the archived information, said Jack Mannino, CEO at nVisium, an application security provider.
“In letting their strong emotions trump their better judgment, many people committed questionable unlawful acts and appear to have left behind quite a large digital trail of evidence,” he told the Washington Examiner. “Parler grew quickly, with high visibility and scrutiny. However, they did not have the same level of sophistication as the bigger players in social media to ensure privacy and reasonable security for users.”
