Nearly Two Months After Insurrection, Parler Maps Take Shape
Developers and coders have been utilizing GPS metadata and videos from Parler to offer a glimpse of what was happening inside and around the Capitol building on January 6.One such team has put together a map that utilizes facial recognition technology, allowing anyone to upload a personal photo to the website and search multimedia taken on the day of the Capitol Hill insurrection. For example, if an Alaskan friend of yours travelled to Capitol Hill, you can drop a photograph of them onto the website and the website will scan multimedia on file for January 6 for potential matches of your friend.
Another self-described coder published a map of GPS coordinates tied to 68,000 videos uploaded to Parler which were taken from the service before it went offline in January — but now it appears more information has been added to that map since the project began as Parler usernames, names and posts have slowly begun to be assigned to the GPS metadata. The process by which data was obtained from Parler is known as scraping - not hacking - and it should be noted that scraping is not illegal, as a court ruled in 2019 and thus isn't a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Last week, the far-right social media platform Gab was indeed hacked by the DDoSecrets group which made 70 GB of passwords and private posts available to researchers, journalists, and social scientists. Metadata taken from the Parler scrape includes longitude, latitude, timestamp, the corresponding ID, Parler username, the name associated with the Parler account and post data. In one particular post taken around Capitol Hill on the day of the insurrection, an individual wrote that they brought 16 people to Washington DC and that he had been gassed four times. Facing financial woes related to being an insurrectionist, the individual made a plea for financial help so that he and other patriots could "hold the line."
Compared to the rest of the lower 48, Alaska has a relatively small Parler userbase, which some might find somewhat reassuring — but Parler users in the state were not exempt from having their metadata scraped.
Outside Homer, Alaska, Parler metadata has recently been added to one red dot on the map. The timestamp of the post clearly shows that the post has nothing to do with the events of January 6, 2021 but appears to indicate one user in the state of Alaska was practicing a three round mag change drill, according to a collected post made by the user.
The highest concentrations of Parler data on the Alaska map can be found in Anchorage, Mat-Su and Fairbanks, although a smattering of users can be found across the state with 3 red dots appearing in the Eagle River/Chugiak area. The process of associating the relevant metadata with Parler users isn't a quick process and can take time. Both the Parler scrape and Gab hack should serve as a reminder to those individuals who don't trust "big-tech" to be more circumspect with what they post online if they're going to venture into far-right social media spaces.
Parler data is continuously being added to the map albeit slowly. If you were a Parler user before the service went offline in January, you may want to keep tabs on what metadata, if any, gets applied to the map in the future.
