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Some Parler Users Don’t Believe They’ve Been Hacked — They’re Blaming Amazon Instead
’Guaranteed not a hack’
Before Parler went offline Monday morning, a hacker reportedly downloaded all the data that users had shared to the platform, including images, video, and deleted posts mentioning the assault on the Capitol last week, Motherboard reported.
Now, some Trump supporters who have fled to MeWe and Telegram are insisting the hack is “fake news,” and are baselessly claiming it was coordinated by Twitter and Amazon Web Services to dissuade people from using Parler, in the event that it returns. Messages viewed by OneZero show conservatives trying to dismiss the archiving of their posts as a subversive attempt by major tech companies to bring Parler down.
Meanwhile, the Parler data is currently being downloaded and processed, Motherboard noted.
“Twitter is trying to convince ppl that Parler is unsafe and hacked to keep Patriots from going there,” one person wrote in a Telegram chat called “Parler Lifeboat,” which has roughly 15,700 members.
“Guaranteed not a hack,” wrote another person in the chat. “AWS leak.”
A hacker who goes by the Twitter handle @donk_enby told Gizmodo they first downloaded every Parler post from January 6, the day of the attempted coup in Washington, D.C. Motherboard reported that @donk_enby reverse engineered Parler’s iOS app “in order to find a web address that the application uses internally to retrieve data.” She decided to archive every post shared to the platform after Amazon Web Services told Parler it would no longer host the site due to its inability to police violence and hate speech, BuzzFeed News reported on Saturday.
A spokesperson for Amazon Web Services did not immediately respond to OneZero’s request for comment.
Roughly 99.9% of all Parler content has been archived, Gizmodo wrote, and @donk_enby has since established a crowdsourcing effort for downloading the content. Processed…
