You should go read this Gizmodo report that uses Parler’s leaked GPS data to show that its users were among the mob that stormed the Capitol last Wednesday. The report comes in the wake of the social network’s near-complete removal from the Internet, and is a good read for anyone who’s been following the story. The reporters, Dell Cameron and Dhruv Mehrotra, had to sift through tons of posts to build a map of the riot:
Gizmodo has mapped nearly 70,000 geo-located Parler posts and on Tuesday isolated hundreds published on January 6 near the Capitol where a mob of pro-Trump supporters had hoped to overturn a democratic election and keep their president in power.
When Parler went down, a researcher was able to exploit some terrible security practices to download almost all its data — including videos that contained tagged GPS locations. This is how Gizmodo tracked the mob’s movement: from a Trump rally held earlier in the day to, eventually, inside the nation’s Capitol building.
Since the Capitol riot, almost every company that Parler works with has dropped them as a client, including Amazon, which hosted the site’s data, and Google and Apple, which hosted the app on their stores. The companies banned the site because of claims that it held calls for violence against the US government.
While Gizmodo’s report doesn’t show how wide-spread the problem was on the site, it certainly shows that that Parler was actively used by people who took place in the attack. It goes into detail about what the mob did, and how the GPS data shows certain moments that have been burned into many of our memories, so it’s well worth the read.
