Coding mess
A key reason for her success: Parler’s site was a mess. 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.
The rookie code made it easy to automate the scraping, as this script used by donk_enby’s archival team demonstrates. As a result, massive numbers of posts that discussed the insurrection before, during, and after it was carried out will be preserved indefinitely so that they’re available to researchers, journalists, prosecutors, and others.
Another amateur mistake was Parler’s failure to scrub geolocations from images and videos posted online. Sites like Twitter and Google routinely remove such metadata from content posted by their users. The video files hosted on Parler, by contrast, were “raw,” meaning they still contained this information.
Parler’s moderation policies—even more lax than those of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube—already made the site popular with far-right users looking for a forum to discuss debunked conspiracy theories. With Twitter permanently banning Trump, the president’s supporters embraced the site even more enthusiastically.
Prosecutors are already pursuing more than 150 suspects in Wednesday’s riot. The preservation of some 80TB of Parler posts, including more than 1 million raw video files, may result in more people being charged.