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Network Parler: Hundreds of thousands of contributions will soon be publicly available
Photo: IAN LANGSDON / EPA-EFE / Shutterstock
Before the right-wing social network Parler went offline, a hacker claims to have backed up almost everything that users published and shared about the storming of the Capitol on January 6th.
The material archived by it therefore includes profile descriptions, images and videos - including geodata, i.e. information on where someone was when they were active in the network.
Before the riots in Washington DC, users organized on Parler: They shared locations, called for violence and commented on events.
Many users later deleted their posts - probably also out of fear of prosecution.
The hacker, who calls herself @donk_enby on Twitter, wanted to archive the Parler postings so that this information is not lost and so that people can be identified and posts can be assigned.
"The things that are available there are criminal," she said on Twitter.
Archiving as a crowdsourcing project
Documenting what was happening on Parler had taken on a new urgency when Parler boss John Matze announced that the site would go offline: Amazon Web Services (AWS) had announced that it would no longer host Parler after Sunday.
The hacker then began crowdsourcing the archive so that multiple users could download content at the same time.
She compared her work on Twitter with a group of people "who run into a burning building and try to take as much as possible with them."
According to @donk_enby, all contributions, a total of around 70 terabytes of data, should be published on the pages of the so-called Internet Archive and thus made accessible to journalists, scientists and law enforcement agencies.
"What I do is the opposite of censorship"
@donk_enby on Twitter
Deleted posts are also archived
The hacker and her colleagues have a security flaw to thank for the fact that even deleted posts could be archived during their procedure.
Because the Twilio company, which previously verified new Parler accounts, no longer works with the network, the hackers simply got tons of administrator accounts.
They were authorized to view and save posts that were marked as deleted.
Contrary to initial reports, the team said they did not save any private data such as phone numbers, email addresses or credit card numbers, "unless you posted it yourself on Parler".
“What I do is the opposite of censorship,” @donk_enby wrote clearly on Twitter.
Archiving is not the first incident where Parler data has ended up elsewhere on the network.
Last November, activist Aubrey Cottle managed to save several gigabytes of data from the website.
In an interview with Business Insider, Parler boss Matze confirmed the access, but restricted the fact that it was only publicly available data.
Network popular with rights
Parler calls himself a "Free Speech Network" and is considered a kind of Twitter substitute for the extreme right and conspiracy theorists.
Above all, people post here whose reach has been limited on other platforms.
Content is hardly or only slightly moderated, so that even explicit calls for violence, death threats, racist or anti-Semitic content can be published and shared without any problems.
Since it became known that users had organized themselves on Parler before the attack on the Capitol, Apple and Google have removed the app from their app stores.
Due to the end of the collaboration with AWS, Parler has been offline since Monday night.
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