Parler videos revealing Capitol attack assembled into interactive timeline

More than 500 videos were used to create the interactive timeline, which is split into three locations

Adam Smith
Tuesday 19 January 2021 15:09 EST
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Related video: I was with the rioters who stormed the Capitol - they knew exactly what they were doing

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Over 500 videos taken as rioters stormed the Capitol building have been arranged in chronological order and can be scrolled through by users.

ProPublica published the interactive timeline using videos sourced from Parler, the social network favoured by supporters of the president, which was also gathering users’ GPS data

The ProPublica tool splits the timeline into three different locations, “Around D.C”, “Near Capitol”, and “Inside Capitol”.  

This information was gathered by programmers who were able to scrape publically available information from Parler before it was removed from the web by Apple, Google, and Amazon. 

One hacker told The Independent that 110,000 video URLs, approximately 57TB of data, also had their content scraped and uploaded to The Internet Archive.

In total, over one million videos had been posted to Parler - nearly all of the videos ever uploaded to the social media site.

Approximately 2,500 were related to the Capitol riot, and after ProPublica staff reviewed them 500 were deemed newsworthy and relevant to the events, the publication explained in a write-up

Videos captured include threats to harm lawmakers, assaulting police, and criminal damage. Some users in the video use the front-facing camera to boast about their crimes.

“Can I speak with Pelosi? Yeah, we’re coming for you, bitch. Mike Pence? We’re coming for you too, fucking traitor”, one rioter says in a video. ProPublica reports another asking: “Where are the fucking traitors? Drag them out by their fucking hair.”

Parler’s website reappeared online on 16 January with a brief post from its chief executive officer, John Matze, which stated that “now seems like the right time to remind you all — both lovers and haters — why we started this platform.”    

Apple CEO Tim Cook has said that Parler could return to iPhones should the social media site “get their moderation together.”

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