70TB of Parler posts archived by security researcher

A researcher has archived 70TB of posts from the social medium Parler. That service recently went offline after tech companies broke their ties with the platform. The researcher started archiving after the storming of the US Capitol.

Twitter user donk_enby started archiving Parler messages last week to create a public overview, Gizmodo also writes. The researcher said he had to speed up this process after Amazon Web Services announced last weekend that it will no longer provide hosting services to Parler. The company did this because the service violated Amazon’s terms of service, AWS reported.

The researcher has archived a total of 70TB of posts, including associated metadata as gps data. In total, the archive includes more than a million crawled video URLs, such as writes the Twitter user. It’s alright for instance for messages published during and around the storming of the United States Capitol. The researcher clarifies here that she only archived posts that were publicly available, although she previously suggested that the archive may also contain ‘things from messages that are private or deleted’.

Parler has been around for two years and is an alternative to social media such as Facebook and Twitter. According to the creators of the service, users of that social media cannot always express their opinions without being banned. Parler recently went offline after several tech companies broke ties with the platform. In addition to the ban from Amazon Web Services, the app has also been removed from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

The site has seen a resurgence in popularity in the past week. This coincided with the storming of the US Capitol on Wednesday, January 6. The makers of Parler report that the platform could remain offline for up to a week, but should eventually come back online.