You should go read this Gizmodo report that uses leaked GPS data from Parler to show that its users were among the crowd that broke into the Capitol last Wednesday. The report comes in the wake of the almost complete removal of the social network from the Internet and is a good read for anyone who is following the story. Reporters, Dell Cameron and Dhruv Mehrotra, had to comb through tons of posts to build a riot map:
Gizmodo mapped some 70,000 geo-located Parler posts and on Tuesday hundreds of isolated published on January 6 near the Capitol, where a crowd of pro-Trump supporters hoped to overturn a democratic election and keep their president in power.
When Parler fell, a researcher was able to exploit some terrible security practices to download almost all of his data – including videos that contained marked GPS locations. And so Gizmodo tracked the crowd’s movement: from a Trump demonstration held earlier in the day to eventually inside the nation’s Capitol building.
Since the Capitol riot, almost every company Parler works with has left them as customers, including Amazon, which hosted the site’s data, and Google and Apple, which hosted the app in their stores. Companies banned the site because of allegations that it was calling for violence against the United States government.
While Gizmodo’s The report does not show the extent of the problem on the website, it certainly shows that Parler was actively used by the people who occurred in the attack. It details what the crowd did and how the GPS data shows certain moments that were recorded in many of our memories, so it’s worth reading.