Oh, dear! The fall out from this has the potential to be rather spectacular. If Parler is/was a honey trap run by the security services, what better way to keep that hidden than for the servers to be "hacked" and the authorities get the data that way? ^ All the 'verified' users uploaded masses of identifying documents. Not as was suggested simply downloading publicly available data - someone turned off the security and then left it to others to exploit that? I hope they have many sleepless nights ahead stressed out about how law enforcement will treat that material. These people felt safe in their right wing echo chamber to post material that could incriminate themselves. You must assume that anything you post, for example on this forum, could be retrieved and used in evidence against you at some time in the future. It does demonstrate the ignorance of a lot of people who use the internet. So even the deleted content has been archived
Is merely adds a “deleted bit” to the data. Like most data, deleting content does not purge content.
Users on Parler were tipped off about this and started deleting posts. These accounts were then used by lots of people to run scripts which downloaded all of the data Someone used this to bypass security and created millions of admin accounts The company that provided secure access let slip the server details of the security servers No doubt the media will be exposing the very worst people and I expect that there will be many, many Brits. Its been clarified that it was admin rights they accessed. They also commented that the metadata of photos posted to Parler had not been stripped, so anyone who has posted photos was in danger of having given away their GPS location when the photo was taken, their equipment ID etc. Of course it might be exaggeration but the post I saw on Twitter suggested that they had downloaded all publicly available data. Parler was as easy to join as this forum or twitter but I am glad there are some people saving the content of Parler. Sadly, since Parler has gone down now we can’t see any more posts from them but it seems likely that lots of people are very scared ? but someone managed to gain access to the servers and downloaded 30tb of posts and uploaded media posted during the insurrection.
I’m not 100% sure if this was the cause of the next bit.
It seems the email and phone verification was turned off before it shut down so a bunch of people all joined and started investigating content. So there’s some interesting news on the Parler front.