DIGITAL CULTURE
Were Parler Influencers Paid To Incite Violence At The Capitol?
Parler hack reveals existence of monetization platform and the possibilities of paid hate passing as free speech
Just days ago, a Parler data dump resulted in 70 terabytes of posts, images, and videos being culled and posted publicly just before Amazon pulled the plug on the app’s hosting services. That effort, profiled in Vice, was led by a security researcher, who goes by the handle @donk_enby on Twitter. While the archived assets can be used to determine the GPS coordinates of rioters and synchronize with profiles and incendiary posts, that’s not even the most stunning insight to come from donk_enby.
One week prior to the dump, she also accessed screens and code reserved for Parler administrators and shared evidence of their paid influencer program.
“they have a flag to hide all of this functionality from regular users until they have proven themselves useful or naïve enough”- @donk_enby
Last week, Amazon and Twilio shuttered their doors to Parler while Google and Apple stripped them from their respective app stores. Parler supporters have…
