From what I understand, Parler was bankrolled and designed to do exactly what it was ultimately shutdown for. That is, be a concentrated anger-machine-echo-chamber. I'm not angry at the public corporations that have dropped Parler. I'm angry at the people that created Parler in the first place. It was basically a poison pill designed to test our feelings about free speech, designed to provoke. Mission accomplished, buttheads.<p>I think we'll see the angry mob go end up at less discoverable, but more robust distributed platforms. Which is a shame, because it means eventually, when I say that you can find me on Mastadon/Scuttlebutt/etc, the average person will say, "Oh, you're on that extremist network?"<p>The benefit to Facebook/Reddit/Twitter is that while Parler is dominating the discussion, they can start cleaning up their most toxic communities.
> Its public API used no authentication. When users deleted their posts, the site failed to remove the content and instead only added a delete flag to it. Oh, and each post carried a numerical ID that was incremented from the ID of the most recently published one.<p>There's really nothing wrong with any of that, unless you're specifically coding to defend against content scraping. I mean, the whole point of a "tweet" or whatever they're called in Parler land is to be public and discoverable.<p>> failure to scrub geolocations from images and videos posted online<p>Worse, but again, was the site even supposed to be designed with anonymity in mind?
I still doubt many rioters used Parler to coordinate. Glenn Greenwald has been investigating this and had as of a few days ago found none of those arrested on the platform. Facebook sat on the "stop the steal" FB groups for ~70 days and had so far not gotten much scrutiny.
As linked in article, scraping code here:<p><a href="https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/parler-grab/blob/master/parler.lua" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/parler-grab/blob/master/parle...</a>
If I’m understanding what happened correctly, the archivists here exploited a vulnerability to create numerous administrator accounts on the system, bypassing Parler’s security (as trivial as that was), and used those accounts to access private information from all individuals on the platform.<p>My question is this: are the people who originally exploited this, created the image, and the users who downloaded it to collect the data going to be subject to federal charges? It seems obvious that they broke the DMCA in using the exploit and the FCAA in collecting and publishing the data acquired.<p>If so, and the data were obtained through criminal means, is it even admissible in a criminal case?<p>Full disclosure - I have/had a verified Parler account, dating long before the Capitol stuff. I tend to join pretty much all the new social network stuff to claim my name and so I know what I’m talking about when I discuss it elsewhere. I don’t think I ever posted a “Parley”, and if memory serves the only PMs I sent were asking a friend about LED headlight options for my wife’s vehicle. I’m not concerned about that conversation leaking, but it will amuse to me see if it’s in the collected dataset.