If you’ve ever posted content to the right-wing social media platform Parler, chances are it has now been saved, archived and made public on the Internet forever.
This includes posts that you previously deleted from Parler.
In the past few days, archivists have been extracting content from Parler to store it for legal and historical purposes.
Archivists started saving the data because they feared users would remove their posts, excluding possible evidence of crime on Capitol Hill. However, after companies like Amazon announced that they were ending their business relationship with Parler, it became a race to archive the content before the platform went offline.
Parler played a key role in the January 6 invasion of the Capitol by Trump supporters, which resulted in five deaths and at least 25 cases of domestic terrorism. Pro-Trump personalities used the platform to promote the event and many Trump supporters who participated posted updates, including Capitol photos and video evidence, on the platform.
I am now tracking URLs of all videos uploaded to Parler. Sequentially, from the newest to the oldest. VIDXXX.txt files arriving, 50 thousand pieces, there will be 1.1 million URLs in total: https://t.co/YUl8CtoeEA
This can include things from deleted / private posts.
– failure cancellation (@donk_enby) January 10, 2021
The campaign to support Parler was by Twitter user @donk_enby. The archivist described the material she was saving as “very incriminating,” according to Gizmodo. She claims that she was able to access the content that Parler’s users had “deleted” from the platform because Parler did not remove the content. Mashable contacted @donk_enby for more comments, but we received no response. When she spoke to Gizmodo, she asked to be nominated only on her Twitter.
When @donk_enby started working on data extraction, eventually taking what she says is responsible for Parler’s content, misinformation spread over the archiving campaign. On Twitter and Reddit, people incorrectly described how archived data was retrieved.
Parler has not been hacked and private information has not been accessed. Telephone numbers and credit cards were not obtained in the breach. Only the content that Parler made publicly available was accessed, @donk_enby said on twitter.
since many people seem confused about this detail and there is a nonsense reddit post out there:
only things that were publicly available over the web were archived. I don’t have your email address, phone number or credit card number. unless you posted it on parler yourself.
– failure cancellation (@donk_enby) January 11, 2021
The @ donk_enby archiving campaign was carried out using public APIs, with great help from Parler’s badly coded platform. An API is basically a system that allows an application to communicate with other applications. Social media APIs often provide third parties with easy ways to access their feeds in real time for analysis or research, for example.
The content was then scraped, a practice that goes against the terms of service for some platforms, but it is not illegal.
How easy was it to get all the images sent to Parler? Because the platform the content for sequentially numbered URLs. What does that mean? Take the URL of a YouTube video, for example. Each video is located at a URL that begins with “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=” followed by a string of random characters. Parler, however, saved all the images sequentially (ie 1, 2, 3 and so on), making it easy to set up a script that just went through all the URLs and pulled all the images from the site.
Another false claim stated that the hack allowed any user to create a high-level “administrator” account at Parler because a security authentication company also severed ties with Parler. Although the last part is true – for a while, any user could set up a Parler account without having to authenticate using an SMS text code – this did not allow users to have an “administrator” account.
All @donk_enby did to access the back-end information was to decompile the mobile app, which provided a view of the features already encoded in the app, but hidden from public view. Developers sometimes do this for the next features in mobile apps.
On Monday morning, Amazon made official with Parler and suspended its web hosting services with the platform, resulting in the withdrawal of the entire social network. This change came after Apple and Google, the company’s mobile app in its app stores.
Parler says they had better come back – if they ever get things back up and running.
As for all that Parler content archived? According to @donk_enby, the data hosted by.