The right-wing social media platform Parler, which has been offline since Amazon Web Services dropped it like a hot potato last week, has reappeared on the web with the promise of returning as a fully functional service “soon”.
Although the platform’s Android and iOS apps are still extinct, this weekend its URL has once again started to turn into a real website instead of an error warning. The site currently consists of only the homepage, which carries a message from the company’s CEO, John Matze.
“Now it seems like the right time to remind all of you – lovers and haters – why we started this platform,” says the message. “We believe that privacy is fundamental and freedom of expression is essential, especially on social networks. Our goal has always been to provide a non-partisan public square where individuals can enjoy and exercise their rights for both. We will resolve any challenge before us and plan to welcome everyone of you back soon. We will not let civil discourse perish! “
Parler, however, became deplatform in the first place explicitly because the content that allowed it to flourish was anything but “civil” and, as several reports made clear, the service back-end was designed primarily without concern for privacy. Meanwhile, the path that Parler seems to be taking to rejoin the Internet is a bleak one, paved for it by other explicitly extremist white nationalist platforms that have lost access to more conventional services after being linked to terrorism.
Three strokes
Parler’s depletion began in the wake of insurrectionist riots at the U.S. Capitol the previous week, when it became clear that several Parler users who used the platform to make threats were in fact present in the crowd that broke into the building.
The rebels who met in the district of Columbia on January 6 not only planned their attack using social media platforms, but also used those platforms – especially Parler – while on Capitol Hill. Many major media outlets reported before, during and after the January 6 events that protesters were using Parler to organize themselves.
Google pulled Parler out of the Android app store on January 8, citing his failure to explicitly remove “blatant content” that incited violence. Apple did the same a few hours later, suspending Parler from the iOS App Store for failing to remove “threats of violence and illegal activity” under Apple’s developer agreement.
The final blow for Parler came that weekend, when AWS stopped providing web hosting services for the platform and considered it a “very real risk to public security”.
“It is clear that Parler does not have an effective process for complying with AWS terms of service,” wrote the company in an email to Parler. “You remove some violent content when contacted by us or others, but not always urgently. Its CEO has publicly stated recently that he does not ‘feel responsible for any of this, nor should the platform should’. … In our opinion, this nascent plan to use volunteers to promptly identify and remove dangerous content will not work due to the increasing number of violent posts. “
Parler turned around and sued Amazon over the ban, asking the court for immediate reinstatement. So far, however, this process has only made it clear how much violent content Parler was apparently willing to host, as Amazon in its legal response brought receipts (really vile) showing the type of content it had explicitly warned Parler for months.
About this privacy …
In the approximately 24 hours between the time Amazon warned Parler that it would end the company’s service and the moment the platform finally went offline, a quick-thinking researcher was able to scrape and archive almost all of Parler’s public content – , due to Parler’s poor coding choices meant that she was able to access not only some deleted posts, but also a treasure trove of metadata, including accurate GPS locations for user videos.
Researchers, journalists and police have since been able to use this data to gather a very comprehensive picture of what happened inside the Capitol that day – and who was there doing it.
Gizmodo quickly used GPS data to assemble a map showing that there were hundreds of videos posted in Parler from the Capitol grounds or inside the building on January 6. Another researcher made an interactive map linking the videos to the location pins for easy viewing. And over the weekend, ProPublica published a comprehensive timeline with more than 500 Parler videos to show the day’s events, from President Donald Trump’s speech near the White House to the eventual dissolution of the mafia earlier in the evening.
Federal authorities have already made more than 100 arrests related to the Capitol attack. Court documents show that many of the suspects currently in prison used social media, including Parler, to share images, videos or live streams of their alleged crimes.
The road back to visibility
Parler apparently secured Epik’s hosting to go back online. Epik is best known for helping the extreme right-wing platform Gab get back online shortly after a Gab user committed a mass murder at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018; he also provided services to other white nationalist, anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi platforms, including 8chan (now known as 8kun) and The Daily Stormer.
Multiple security researchers Also has pointed that Parler appears to have secured the services of DDoS-Guard, a cloud services company based in Russia.
Cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs published last year an analysis of the possible legal responsibilities that DDoS-Guard may face within the United States due to its client list. Krebs called the list “revealing”, noting that it includes “a large number of phishing sites and domains linked to cybercrime services or forums”.
Most notably, DDoS-Guard also provides hosting services for Hamas, which the United States has classified as a terrorist organization for more than 20 years.