Uses of Parler ahead of the 6 January 2021 US Coup Attempt

It’s unreasonably early in Philadelphia, and we’re at the start of the AoIR 2023 conference proper. I’m in a panel on extremism, and we start with Shawn Walker, Michael Someone, and Ben Gansky, whose focus is on the 6 January 2021 insurrection in the United States. This focusses especially on the role of Gab, Parler, and Rumble, and other alt-tech Websites; it builds on an influencer dataset containing Trumpist influencers; an NYU dataset of Parler posts; and a Twitter dataset of tweets by 13 people who objected to the certification of the 2020 election results, which includes the deleted tweets collected by the now defunct Politwoops service.

Parler was deplatformed by Amazon Web Services in 2021, and a new Parler has been launched in the meantime; this is therefore very much about the first incarnation of Parler, in its heyday. Parler accounts and posts rose first in mid-2020 and spiked especially around the November 2020 election; many users claimed (incorrectly) to have left Twitter because of ‘censorship’, and went to Parler because of its absence of any meaningful content moderation.

The analysis here makes a difference between Influencers (e.g. Michael Flynn); objectors (Members of Congress who contested the legitimate election results); and contestors (members of the public who bought into the ‘Stop the Steal’ rhetoric. This focusses especially on the objectors, all of whom had set up verified accounts, posted frequently, and accumulated a substantial number of followers (in the hundreds of thousands or even millions). They include far-right politicians like Devin Nunes, Ted Cruz, or Jim Jordan.

These objectors posted a substantial number of links to outside information, including to video hosting site Rumble, Breitbart, Dan Bongino’s site, and also to Twitter, while on Twitter they also linked prominently to House, Senate, and US government domains (these were absent from Parler). Topic modelling also revealed different content themes in the Parler and Twitter messages: while both talk a lot about Donald Trump, on Parler the focus is strongly on the election (and there are also a lot of empty posts containing only images); on Twitter the focus is more strongly on China, COVID-19, labour issues, and other topics. The Parler rhetoric collocates the term ‘election’ more strongly with terms like ‘fraud’ and ‘interference’, while on Twitter the term ‘fake votes’ is more prominent. This points to far more extreme claims on Parler about active fraud in the election, even by the same people – Ted Cruz’s or Marjorie Taylor Greene’s messages across the two platforms vary widely, for instance. This continues right up until the 6 January 2021 coup attempt.