Parler crawls back online empty and with a Tea Party CEO

Parler, a social network adopted by the far right and recently kicked off AWS for its userbase’s habit of advocating violence, is back online. The restoration questions the notion that “big tech” can take and keep an unwanted presence offline, but Parler’s return is not quite a triumph, and its new CEO doesn’t suggest much of a change in philosophy. Users can now log in to Parler on the web, but when they do they will find that all their old posts and content have been removed. It’s unclear whether this was a consequence of the hurried exit from AWS last month, a scorched-earth policy regarding the content that got the site in hot water in the first place or for some other reason. Fortunately someone had the presence of mind to make a backup, though not with the intention of restoring it. @donk_enby scraped millions of posts and media files from the site for posterity, something that has already borne fruit as researchers have used the files to show, for example, where certain users were on the day of the Capitol riots.  » Read More