PSA: Social Media Alert

1. Parler, a so-called "free speech" social media platform that is popular among President Donald Trump's supporters and others on the far-right, went down on Sunday after Apple and Google removed the company's app from their services and Amazon Web Services refused to continue hosting it.

But its demise may be short-lived, as a Washington State-based web hosting company called Epik has evidently agreed to host the site. Epik serves as a safe haven for other far right sites, such as the notorious right-leaning social network Gab.

2. Parler's data archive is poised to be used to help ID some of the rioters at the Capitol last week. A hacker who goes by @donk_enby was able to archive roughly 99 percent of the content from Parler before it was kicked offline, much of which she described as "very incriminating" against the people who posted it. She explained to Gizmodo that she began by downloading every Parler post from January 6, the day that Trump fomented a coup attempt in Washington which culminated in the Capitol Riot. She is believed to have reverse-engineered Parler's iOS app to find a web address that the company uses to retrieve data on an internal level, later deciding to archive every post that appeared on the site after Amazon said it would no longer serve as a host.

"Unlike many other systems, Parler requires users to provide a photocopy of identification (typically a state driver's license) in order to be 'verified' on the site," former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy in the Department of Homeland Security Paul Rosenzweig wrote for Lawfare on Monday. "This ID, along with all of the metadata for Parler posts—such as geo tags for images, IP addresses for posters and so on—was available to Parler administrators. Likewise, the actual content of Parler posts—videos, texts, and such—was also available in plain view format to administrators." He pointed out that anyone who used Parler to plan, commit or record crimes during the Capitol Riot could be implicated due to the hack, since it would "in the hands of law enforcement, be a treasure trove of leads and, ultimately, of digital forensic evidence that would be useful in proving individual criminal guilt." — --Matthew Rozsa

https://www.salon.com/2021/01/11/maga-ap…