Parler users' posts archived along with some location data

The social network popular with far-right extremists is also suing Amazon for shutting down its AWS account.

Laura Hautala Former Senior Writer

Laura wrote about e-commerce and Amazon, and she occasionally covered cool science topics. Previously, she broke down cybersecurity and privacy issues for CNET readers. Laura is based in Tacoma, Washington, and was into sourdough before the pandemic.

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Laura Hautala

Jan. 11, 2021 12:29 p.m. PT

2 min read

gettyimages-1230535124 — An archive of Parler posts, including deleted posts, has been created.
Getty Images

An archive of posts on Parler has been created, and it includes deleted posts and location data for images and videos. A person claiming credit for scraping the data said she wanted to create an archive of the service, popular with conservatives and members of the far right, for future researchers to look through before it was taken offline.

Parler is no longer functional because Amazon Web Services stopped hosting the service on Sunday. Apple and Google also stopped offering the Parler app in their respective app stores. The companies said Parler, which became a haven for racist and extremist content, allowed messages inciting violence, including posts about the insurrection at the US Capitol on Jan. 6 that led to the deaths of five people. "It's clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service," Amazon said in an email first obtained by BuzzFeed.

In response to losing the cloud hosting services of Amazon, Parler has sued Amazon for antitrust violations, claiming the action favors Parler's competitor Twitter. Amazon said the lawsuit had no merit, and reiterated its stance that Parler doesn't moderate content promoting violence. Parler didn't respond to a request for comment.

A hacker posting as @donk_enby on Twitter detailed how she created the archive, first trying to capture small amounts of data and then coordinating with more people to scrape as much data as possible from Parler's systems before they went offline. The group appears to have exploited weaknesses in Parler's systems in order to download the content en masse.

The hacker said she'd describe the effort as "a bunch of people running into a burning building trying to grab as many things as we can."

For the journalists DMing me to ask, in non-technical terms, I'd describe the current Parler archival situation as "a bunch of people running into a burning building trying to grab as many things as we can".
Things will be available in a more accessible form later.
— crash override (@donk_enby) January 10, 2021

The archive appears to contain the content of posts from Parler along with their original URLs, as well as metadata for videos and images. The metadata for images and videos appeared to contain GPS data for where the person was located. Gizmodo reported that the archive contains 99.9% of Parler's content.

Parler users posted about the archive effort before the app went down on Sunday. "Left extremists have captured and archived over 70TB of data from parler servers," an account called North Central Florida Patriots posted. "It is too late to scrub your data, and its already archived."

Queenie Wong and Rae Hodge contributed to this report.