I Analyzed 1.9 Million Parler Posts Made During the Capitol Riot
There were more chicken soup recipes than posts about fallen Capitol officers
On January 11, Amazon pulled the plug on hosting services for social app Parler, stating violations of their terms of service. But just before that happened, @donk_enby, the Twitter alias of a security researcher, culled and published all available public images, public videos, and public posts made on the platform from January 6 through January 10.
Before being taken off-line, Parler had achieved over 11 million downloads, with most installs (9 million) coming from the United States, reports CNET. According to analytics company Sensor Tower, the app was downloaded 997,000 times from Apple’s App Store and Google Play during that final week before going dark. And in that week, 70 terabytes of user-generated content was generated.
As a result of the data dump project, the videos have been published on ProPublica so the public can see firsthand what Parler users saw. In contrast, the cache of unstructured HTML pages, though stored on the Internet Archive, is not easily searchable.
So this week, I ran those public HTML pages, all 1,854,330 of them, through a full-text database and indexed them to make search easier and glean some…
