Read on Twitter
A breakdown of some of our findings regarding the history and userbase of Parler, using public profile data almost up until the point where AWS pulled the plug, including some entertaining analyses of user bios and their languages, emoji, linkouts, etc. https://twitter.com/stanfordio/status/1354882709974175747
Apart from the majority US userbase, we note the fairly active Brazilian Parler community; many of the most followed users were investigated by the STF for links to the "Gabinete do Ă“dio", a disinfo operation supporting Bolsonaro before and after the 2018 elections.
The Japanese QAnon community also migrated to Parler after increased enforcement against Q-related Twitter accounts across languages:
One of the more entertaining things was finding a slew of accounts related to what claims to be an organic Parler "growth" service with fabulously weird branding — nothing says "trustworthy" like a guy hiding in M18 smoke
Not super "organic" either. Once phone numbers were no longer required to register due to the Twilio shutdown, the floodgates opened for all kinds of spammers. h/t to @VisiData btw, which I used for almost all of this analysis.
Anyway! It turns out that a handful of volunteer, largely monolingual moderators doesn't work so well for containing extremism and disinfo, even if your standards are fairly loose. We'll be digging more into Parler and some of the communities we've identified in the near future.
Also, if you haven't checked out the iDRAMA report, it's essential reading for a full view of how Parler operated, with details on badge types, as well as hashtag and bigram analysis on Parler post data.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.03820
https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.03820
