S3 E1: Parler and January 6th: One Year Later

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

platform, people, talking, election, important, themes, data, post, political figures, folks, misinformation, twitter, idea, link, content, tech, starting, january, big, conservative

SPEAKERS

Shawn Walker, Michael Simeoni

 

Michael Simeone  00:00

This is Misinfo Weekly, a somewhat weekly program about misinformation in our time. Misinfo Weekly is made by the Unit for Data Science and Analytics at Arizona State University Library.  Hello, and welcome. It is January 5th, 2022. And this is the first episode of Season 3 of Misinfo Weekly. And today we're actually together in the same studio, Shawn. 

 

Shawn Walker  00:25

Yeah, it's weird to see your face not on the camera.

 

Michael Simeone  00:27

And you'll also find a link in the podcast notes. So today we want to talk through a report by the New America Foundation. Report to which Sean and I both contributed as part of really a fantastic team in in putting out a report on Parler and the role of Alt-Tech in the January 6th insurrection. The official title of it is 'Parler and The Road to the Capital Attack.' Subtitle 'Investigating Alt-Tech Ties to January 6th', lead author is Candace Rondeaux. And you can find it on the New America website online. And it's actually a pretty lengthy report and has a lot of different sections. There's a kind of TLDR section and then there's some in depth bits as well complete with a ton of data analysis and summary.

 

Shawn Walker
And you will also find a link in the podcast notes. 

 

Michael Simeone

Yeah, we can definitely link that in the show notes. But, we want to we want to talk about Parler again today. Not just because this report came out today on the eve of the anniversary of January 6, but we also want to check in on Parler,  so to speak because we did do an episode on Parler. 

 

Shawn Walker  01:26

During our first season. Our first year.

 

Michael Simeone  01:27

During our first year back in 20. Geez. Back in 2020. In the summer of 2020. We did an episode on when it was just a wee baby emerging platform. 

 

Shawn Walker

Versus now it's had a couple evolutions deep platformed and is still actually going pretty strong, even though most folks are talking about the first iteration of Parler, which is what we'll focus mostly on today. Right?   

 

Michael Simeone

Yeah, well, let's let's let's do a quick timeline on Parler, I guess. And like pretty rough. I want to say when we were talking about Parler in summer of 2020. That's when Parler and that was kind of our conversation was trying to get a sense of what was going on with Parler because it was starting to gain some legitimacy. Because information was passing from Parler to kind of more legitimate news sources. And people were starting to recognize Parler more and more. 

 

Shawn Walker

Yeah, so Parler actually started in 2018. And pretty much from around the first year that the platform was in existence to kind of mid 2019. It was not that impressive or not that important. Not that active. Let's say that. 

 

Michael Simeone

A pretty quiet place. 

 

Shawn Walker  02:31

Yes. And then basically around the summer of 2020, then.

 

Michael Simeone  02:40

Well, you got a lot more people joining. And again, you know why we were podcasting about it in the first place was it seemed to be getting attention and legitimacy. So it was kind of the first really big punctuation mark, I think, in the history of the platform. Not withstanding like the origin of the platform or any of those kinds of things. But it first caught our attention for those reasons. And that was that was summer 2020. If I could I think the next event, Shawn, it's got to be the Fall of 2020. Right around November?

 

Shawn Walker  03:10

Yes, so but I guess if we rewind back, the reason why the platform grew was because basically Facebook and Twitter, Twitter especially stepped up their content, moderation activities. And so they were starting to remove misinformation surrounding the election. And so there was this sort of mass exodus, moving towards end of spring and beginning of summer of 2020, where the platform really started to take hold as this sort of like free speech platform for conservatives. And there was this myth that social media platforms were suppressing content and suppressing free speech of conservatives.

 

Michael Simeone  03:45

Yeah. And I think we're gonna… that's a good theme to highlight now that throughout all of the major kind of history points in that we're going to talk about today, which is kind of summer 2020, November 2020, and then January 2021. Throughout each of those three points in Parler's history, this idea that Parler is like the last bastion, or one of the last bastions, where people can say stuff without being oppressed by Alt Tech or by Big Tech. I'm sorry, that's going to be enduring.

 

Shawn Walker  04:14

And I think a quick side angle here. What's Big Tech versus Alt Tech? What does this Alt Tech term mean? 

 

Michael Simeone 04:20

Yeah. So this is this actually, the New America colleagues introduced this term to me, I, I love this term, Alt Tech, the idea of recognizing Facebook, Twitter, as Big Tech, Google, Microsoft, these are big establishment technology companies and Alt Tech, which is less moderation less well, on the surface, less corporate interest, less alignment with the political left, so on and so forth.

 

Shawn Walker  04:47

So they're kind of the small players in the room, but the small players that cater to folks with potentially views that might not be welcome on some of the other platforms or they might not feel that they are welcome on other platforms.

 

Michael Simeone  04:59

Sure. Well, I think it's important that you know where the money comes from, for a lot of these different platforms. It's kind of mysterious. So it's unclear if they're big money, or not. In many cases, it's certainly important for Alt Tech to appear to be small money or not really, you know, profiting off the kind of social activity that the so called mainstream tech does. But like I said, I think that's an important image to maintain for these things. But that's what we mean, when we refer to this idea of Alt Tech and in the, in the article that we mentioned at the top of the podcast that that term comes up a lot, too.

 

Shawn Walker  05:33

And there's also this idea that conservative voices, I mean, kind of quote, unquote, conservative voices, especially, I would argue extremist conservative voices, were saying that they were being overly moderated and suppressed on big tech platforms, or I would argue these are kind of more than mainstream platforms that everyone sees on a day to day basis, like Facebook and Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, those places. There was a claim that these conservative voices were being suppressed. 

 

Michael Simeone

Right, right.

 

Shawn Walker

Was that true? So there's narrative that conservative voices, especially on the far right, we're being suppressed by social media platforms, more mainstream platforms like Twitter and Facebook and such, were unfairly censoring them versus non conservative voices, is there any evidence to that?

 

Michael Simeone  06:24

I don't think the research backs that up. 

 

Shawn Walker

Okay.  So we have the sort of myth that these voices are being suppressed. And that myth is part of the movement that cause a movement or exodus like immigration to Parler? 

 

Michael Simeone

Sure, sure. And here's what we have, right? We have these two checkpoints that we want to talk about today, in Parler's history. And notice that like we're kind of kind of carving out the middle ages for Parler. We've got the kind of early times and back in 2018, leading up to 2020. Then we got the Middle Ages of Parler, which is really that summer when you get this exodus, and people are starting to really cultivate this myth that they're being oppressed and that Parler is one of their last bat. And then after January 6th, you know Parler gets really deplatformed by Amazon Web Services, and they get picked up again, I think they get kicked around a couple different hosts. And then finally to get picked up again, and Parler's back. We're not going to talk about the kind of post January 2021 Parler, right, those are, those are those that's a different time period in the history of the platform, we're not going to cover that today, we can talk about that in a different podcast, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on there now. But for today, we're going to be talking about those the Middle Ages of Parler, we're gonna be talking about that, that the meat of 2020 and then leading up until January 2021, some of the characteristics that that we've seen on the platform and that you can find written in the in the in the article as well. And then, you know, also some some, some really like, like salient themes that we think endure, and are important paying attention to.

 

Shawn Walker  07:53

So just to kind of put a bookend at the of Parler 1.0 that we're talking about, they were deplatformed by Amazon Web Services, on January 9th 2021. So that's when they kind of ceased to exist, because all of their infrastructure, so their code, everything ran on Amazon servers on their Amazon Web Services, space. And Amazon shut that off on January 9th. And so Parlor just blip disappeared from the web, except for data that was extracted, and we'll talk about that. But then, in the later date, we'll talk more about how Parler moved to a new home and what Parler of there has become today. 

 

Michael Simeone  08:28

Yeah, so we're gonna be talking about some of our insights about the platform based on our study of the of some of the data of Parler. And that is also reflected in the report that would that we've mentioned previously. But let's talk about the data first, about how we actually got to be able to study Parler in the way that we did.

 

Shawn Walker  08:46

So the problem here is that, as we said, on January 9th, Amazon turned the lights off for Parler. And so when they flipped the switch Parler's data disappeared. So if Parler disappeared as a platform, how do we have any information about it?

 

Michael Simeone  09:01

Right. Well, we got a huge amount of response when that was deplatformed, right? Because that just short of everyone's idea that they were that their backs were against the wall because Amazon is another big tech company. And so this was just more grist for the mill, for people who were thinking that, you know, they're being oppressed by these technology companies but Parler itself right before the lights went out before all this stuff happened on January 9th, ended up getting kind of archived by a couple different parties, and then picked apart really by hackers.

 

Shawn Walker  09:31

Well, in the deplatforming of Parler wasn't an event that happened just at one moment in time, there is a sort of sustained so after January 6th, Parler used a number of vendors for their service. So vendors that would might check security or some users might have validated or verified themselves via uploading their driver's license or other data. So as Parler's reputation or connection with January 6th was solidified in those couple of days after the insurrection on the Capital. These companies abandoned Parler. So there were these huge security holes in Parler's infrastructure that allowed different hackers and different organizations to go in and grab data in ways that they potentially couldn't before. And in general, it should just be known that Parler wasn't a very secure service to begin with, it was seems like it was obviously made by folks that didn't have a lot of experience, writing these types of platforms or working on security. And so as these companies abandoned Parler, and terminated their relationship, it was much easier, it became easier and easier to collect data until January 9th, Amazon turned off the switch. 

 

Michael Simeone  10:35

Yeah, yeah. And so I mean, there's a couple reasons for that, right. One is the way that Parler's put together where nothing about Parler as a platform resists very,  what somebody's trying to just gobble up all the data that's presented on the web, right? If you try to do that on Twitter, just the vast amount of information there is going to is going to keep you from doing that. But then, you know, there's some other things, they're going to really be difficult for you to just gobble up all of Twitter. The volume is also important here, right? There's a reason why if you have access to all of the tweets, as a researcher, they call it the fire. Because it's more information than you know, then you can really handle Parler doesn't have that volume issue, right? It's actually a small enough platform in terms of the total population of posts, where somebody could actually just download a bunch of posts and put it in a zip archive and post it somewhere.

 

Shawn Walker  11:25

I mean, we're still talking about multi terabytes of data. But with, you know, Twitter, we're talking hundreds of millions of posts per day. With with Parler we're not we're talking in the, you know, single millions if that every day. So the data that we have access to one came from a group at NYU, and that we're tracking Parler. The data that we have came from a group at NYU, where they posted it publicly on a data archiving site called Zenodo. And that data was part of a project where they were basically tracking Parler, and trying to describe the platform over a year plus long period. So they came into the platform before it became popular, and basically had this store of data that they were tracking all along. A second piece of data we have was collected by a colleague in our group that focused on about 108 influencers in President Trump's orbit, and their Parler activities. So we had these two chunks of data, as well as a whole cache of data from the different hackers, researchers or members of Reddit had created videos, images, posts, web scrapes. So it's kind of this… 

 

Michael Simeone  12:34

it's like a casserole 

 

Shawn Walker  12:35

Cache of found data. Yeah, we picked up a lot of stuff off the floor.  

 

Michael Simeone 

Yeah, a lot of stuff. But I think it's important at this point, to also mention that, you know, even even though it sounds like, hey, a research group was tracking them longitudinally for a number of years, or all of these really smart hackers, or, or people who are kind of savvy to web technologies. We're trying to archive and collect this information, or David Troy, one of our collaborators, who is who also does this kind of work, right, and is really smart about web data. It may sound like we've got an authoritative collection on Parler, but it's important to keep in mind that we, it's not 100% complete, right? There's no way for us to verify if it is a 100%, exhaustive representation of the platform, right? Even though it's somewhere, you know, close to 200 million posts, I think. This is not, this isn't all of Parler, 100% guaranteed, right? 

 

Shawn Walker

But this is, yes, and this is this is a common theme that we've discussed before in our podcasts, guys. But this is a common theme that we've discussed in our episodes before, like, complete exhaustive data is not possible in many of these cases, either because we can't collect it because it's been deleted, or even because it's we don't know all of the words that someone might have used to describe something. So we might be looking for COVID data. And some people might call it COVID. Some people might call it Coronavirus, and we might call it something else. Collecting everything is kind of an impossibility. So but we have a sort of nice sized sample to be able to describe some of the activities happening on Parler. But this doesn't include absolutely 150% of everything.

 

Michael Simeone  14:15

Yeah. And I think there's there's kind of two two main things, I think that that we'll go over today in terms of our observations of the data that we have. One is it surrounds the kinds of links that get shared on Parler over time. And the other one is kind of the overall themes that tend to pop up in the platform. And so doing a link analysis to be able to understand what domains were being shared out on these Parler posts. And the other one is doing a text analysis to try to understand what ideas people were really talking about when they were engaging with one another on Parler.

 

Shawn Walker  14:47

And where I was going to look at this via sort of different groups. So one might be general users on Parler. Another might be members of Congress that are on Parler, another group might be these influencers within the Trump's orbit, so they might be doing different things or well, not they might. We know that they are doing different things at different moments in time.

 

Michael Simeone  15:05

Yeah, yeah. Well, how should we begin then? I, you know, again, we're kind of looking at how the platform, how there really were some interesting, like inflection points in the platform and that there were some interesting changes, right? I think, really big picture. The Stop the Steal Campaign, kind of right before and after the election was a really important set of messages and a really important theme that showed up on Parler. If that part's unmistakable.

 

Shawn Walker  15:37

So how do we know that? Can you talk a little bit about how we can investigate something like that on a platform like this?

 

Michael Simeone  15:41

Yeah. So I think you know, so I'll speak a little bit to that text analysis, though, that that we had done where one of the biggest themes that came up, reference the hashtag Stop the Steal, but it's more than just, then it's more than just talking about that hashtag right. There were in the kind of text analysis that we did some of the themes that emerged from our analysis was this idea of election fraud, stealing the election, emphasis on auditing, and kind of bringing justice to the electoral power to the electoral process is identified and being an illegitimate president. All of these were kind of related, but distinct themes that popped up out of these Parler posts, all of which seemed to indicate that the idea of a false or fraudulent election was a major theme in some of the most influential Parler posters.

 

Shawn Walker  16:35

And we see that both before the election and then become even stronger after the election, correct?

 

Michael Simeone  16:40

Yeah, Stop the Steal, if I'm not mistaken. And it was something that launched even before the election, like as an anticipatory strike.

 

Shawn Walker  16:48

Yeah. So we have this idea of election fraud in various forms. That kind of softens the ground pre-election so that we've planted this idea in the minds of users, not just on Parler, but beyond this idea that there might be election fraud. Yeah, that the there might be problems. If the election doesn't go, as Trump has said it's going to go, then there's massive amounts of fraud, people should be prepared, they should watch for fraud. Right? If you remember, during the 2020 election, there were these concerns that supporters of Trump,  extreme supporters of Trump right more extremist folks, were going to go to the polls, we're going to be kind of there to observe, watch, harass, right to make sure that things were going okay. And we saw that right. And even in our county, Maricopa County in Phoenix, Arizona, we saw folks camp out outside of the elections office here, or what have elections, and kind of take pictures and make claims as ballots were coming in and out of the elections. 

 

Michael Simeone  17:43

You are talking about the Biden electors, right? 

 

Shawn Walker  17:45

Yep. You know, like, oh, three in the morning, there are ballots, there must be something weird going on. Right? 

 

Michael Simeone  17:48

Right. 

 

Shawn Walker  17:48

So a lot of folks who didn't understand the process of counting ballots, were making claims about what was happening. And that was that was fed by the softening of the ground before the election.

 

Michael Simeone 17:59

Yeah. And I think it's important to point out that the themes that we're talking about here on Parler can also be found on other platforms. These are not distinct to Parler. But as you'll see, the problem is, is that they're the only things on Parler. And and I think, you know, as an aggregate, you get a very interesting environment because of that. So that's one theme. Right? Is this idea that the election was fraudulent? What's another theme that surfaced in some of these Parler posts as we observe some of the activity you know, between November and January.

 

Shawn Walker  18:34

Right so this is when,  we the when was your way that people was that that wasn't during that timeframe? Was it? 

 

Michael Simeone  18:39

Oh, yeah, yeah, the people.

 

Shawn Walker  18:40

Okay. Also another theme if we look at the influencers, the data that Dave Troy collected, one of the members of our group, we see language around like We the people, For the people, as well as the emojis of beer, bacon, and the American flag.

 

Michael Simeone  18:55

One of them, one really popular, I might have mentioned this before, but a really popular three emoji combination was beer, bacon, and the American flag, but yeah, the, the idea, the idea that the people need to speak.

 

Shawn Walker  19:07

So why why does that pop up in your head? 

 

Michael Simeone  19:10

Yeah, so I think it so people is like one of the most used nouns in that entire influencer dataset. Right, that subset of the most influential folks on, and a lot of sentences are something like the people are demanding justice, right? Or the people need to stand up and fight back. Or people do not realize what is happening underneath their noses, right. So that the use of the term people or the people, to me is symptomatic of a very coarse grained political analysis. And when you actually look at the use of the word that people in context and basically run it through a computer program to understand the other words that tend to show up with the word people. All of them are about either mobilizing people to action to resist some kind of nefarious political plot or characterizing people as permanently duped by a political establishment that is corrupt.

 

Shawn Walker  20:06

So is this different than the way folks on the left might use people? As a term?

 

Michael Simeone 20:12

I, I haven't done a quantitative analysis to compare left and right or you know, but I should say that it is a characterization of very partisan speech, to be able to make gross generalizations about the other; or to be able to characterize yourself as some part of revolution, right? And those are your two options, right, is that people are either rubes and they're being duped or people are, are part of this important moment in history. And they're fighting back right? People, right? When you say we the people in the United States that has an important historical resident resonance, and you're actually invoking that moment in history, right? Like you're saying, no, we are, we are declaring a certain kind of independence, right to be able to invoke that term, I think, is pretty remarkable. So, so for counting up our themes here, right, we have a fraudulent election. And then we have this, this use of the idea of the people as a way to describe the political terrain as kind of broken or corrupt.

 

Shawn Walker  21:12

So another theme that we found is that users on Parler talk about other mainstream platforms. So Michael, how do they characterize those other platforms?

 

Michael Simeone  21:20

Yeah, so this is more of what we were talking about earlier, about Parler being a special place where you're free. And these other tech platforms being repressive, big tech, anti conservative, kind of soulless corporations that are against freedom. 

 

Shawn Walker  21:37

So this is reinforcing. The initial reason why many sort of conservative politicians or very conservative like Fox OAN type media folks move to the platform, we're reinforcing some of that language that they use to move to Parler?

 

Michael Simeone  21:53

I think so I think what we're looking at is just this idea that Parler is a special place compared to some of these other platforms. And a lot of testimonials of people saying, I got kicked off this one place, now I am on Parler, and it's actually not uncommon to in any kind of controversy, you know, surrounding the 2020 election, to have people say something like, I know, I'm going to get banned by Twitter by saying this, so follow me to Parler here and unlink their Parler account.

 

Shawn Walker  22:20

There seems some irony in the use of the like, this is a safe space, because there's lots of mocking among many of these users as others wanting safe spaces, but they all move to Parler, which is a safe space for them to talk about some of the conspiracy theories and misinformation that they believe in. 

 

Michael Simeone  22:36

No comment. 

 

Shawn Walker  22:38

They might delete that.

 

Michael Simeone  22:39

No, no, no, I know, it is that that people really do feel like they're, they have been on a journey. And that Parler is part of that journey. That them arriving at Parler is part of some kind of journey through the platforms. And that indicates that they are the ones who are aggrieved. And I think this is an important thing, right. And your point about safe spaces important that all the deck is stacked against people, right? We did find that people were talking about, you know, getting deplatformed by other places and ending up in Parler, and that big tech is stacking the deck against them. That is an important, let's start summing some of these ideas up. If, if big tech is stacking the deck against you. And if the people need to either rise up, or are being duped by a corrupt government, and the election has been stolen by a usurper, right, Biden gets mentioned all the time on Parler. In that context, we're starting to paint a pretty interesting picture here about the state of affairs.

 

Shawn Walker  23:42

So Parler is a place to get red pilled, right?

 

Michael Simeone  23:45

I mean, when you combine that with some of the other things that we that we see there, right themes about COVID-19 being a conspiracy, or a hoax, or how Black Lives Matter and Antifa are a threat to democracy. Add all of that up, that we have BLM and Antifa creating this threat to the civil order that they're coming to replace a way of life. Show up with this virus as a hoax or as meant to control people, and a government who is interested in stealing the election, people who need to wake up. And then on top of all of that, big tech keeping you from from speaking truth. And as we mentioned before, those kinds of themes can be found on Facebook groups and Twitter on other kinds of forums. But but on Parler that characterizes a huge majority of the posts. What it look…taken all together, what do we have?

 

Shawn Walker  24:51

We have this safe space to talk about these ideas, conspiracy theories, misinformation, without any sort of counter.

 

Michael Simeone 25:00

Yeah, I think I think there's no one to talk anyone down from the idea that we are now living in a historic emergency.

 

Shawn Walker  25:14

So in essence, this is a, basically like a train going down a hill without any breaks. 

 

Michael Simeone  25:20

And I think when we look at some of the broader themes of the Parler influencer dataset and start to look at the link-sharing behavior of the kind of whole sample of Parler or close to a whole sample of Parler, we start to see these stories lining up. Shawn, say a little bit about what you saw in the link-sharing behaviors.

 

Shawn Walker  25:46

So first, let's look at the influencer data. So the influencer data are these 100 plus folks that are in Trump's orbit as well as some prominent organizations like the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, the Michael Flynn's, the Rudy Giuliani's, Nunez those kinds of folks, right. So, if we look, we do see some shifts we see in the beginning sort of Summer, Fall 2020. We see them sharing links to some mainstream news sources, but primarily Fox other places, but the usual suspects that you would expect. But then we see a shift in election and beyond with see a shift to more conspiracy theory sites. So, the Gateway Pundants we see links to David Icke, we see Rumble. So Rumble is a sort of all tech YouTube platform. So this is where we're going to find like copies of pandemic after they've been removed from YouTube.

 

Michael Simeone  26:44

For instance.

 

Shawn Walker  26:45

For instance, as one of potential example. And then, you know, after the election, right, we still see some Fox News, some Breitbart, but those starts to decrease in exchange for websites that really peddling blatant misinformation and bleeding conspiracy theory.

 

Michael Simeone  27:01

And this is interesting, because after the election, one of the things that we observe is people starting to bail on Fox News, right? People explicitly coming out on Twitter saying, that's it for me, Fox News, calling the election on the day that it did in the way that it did. I'm done with Fox, I'm moving to OAN and I'm moving to getting my news from other sources. I'm out.

 

Shawn Walker  27:22

I mean, specifically, that was Fox News was the first news organization to call Arizona for Biden yet which angered is probably an understatement, folks.

 

Michael Simeone  27:32

So so let's talk a little bit more about that shift. So we had dealt, there's one kind of link-sharing behavior that mentions more mainstream information sources, and then that shifts to link-sharing behavior. What kinds of link sharing do you see? Like, for instance, Epoch Times start to show up in and the Gateway Pundit starts to show up? What are those sites? Why is it remarkable that they start showing up as things that people are sharing around?

 

Shawn Walker  28:01

What was talked about Epoch Times before because the Epoch Times was at the center of sharing misinformation about Paw Patrol and being Paw Patrol being canceled, right. So, Epoch Times played this role of, and the Western Journal was another sort of new site, you can't see my air quotes right now. But like a new site.

 

Michael Simeone 28:18

We can feel them, yeah.

 

Shawn Walker  28:19

But you can hear the intonation of my voice. But these are sites that basically pedal in alright, misinformation.

 

Michael Simeone  28:28

Highly parsed. 

 

Shawn Walker  28:28

And partisan is an understatement. So if you look at many of the indexes of partisan news sites and such, you'll see these websites are basically off the scale in their part level of partisanship.

 

Michael Simeone  28:41

So if we, if we look at the whole picture, then that we've got a bunch of data about Parler, and that really, we only scratched the surface in in, you know, we've looked a lot at this, at this influencer sample, we've looked at some posts of the broader sample, or some some bits of the broader sample as well, all of it is starting to resolve a little bit in this picture. Where not only do we have this crisis, that that people are kind of talking about and living in, but where the information is coming from, or what kind of information people are sharing. That's different too.

 

Shawn Walker  29:23

Yes, and I think it's important to consider what content we're linking to. So we can think of a link extends a post, right? So we can think of a post on Parler a post on Twitter, Facebook, contains the text of the post any images that someone has embedded in that post, but then it sort of also then sucks in whatever you're linking to. So that becomes a bigger part of that post. So we can think of these as information resources. These are pointers to external resources that they're bringing into the conversation. And I should also add that we see David Icke is in this and he's kind of an interesting guy in the sense that he popularized the idea that a Reptilian humanoid race rules the world. So these are not mainstream science, mainstream news when we talk about links to COVID misinformation, these are not you know, we're not linking to the CDC, we're not linking to the World Health Organization we're linking to folks that are outside of the fringe might be nice, but even farther than the fringe within the journalism community, as well as within the science community.

 

Michael Simeone  30:29

Yeah, I mean, I think, said another way, right. There's, these are all indications that the platform gets more and more extreme as time passes.

 

Shawn Walker  30:41

So we've talked about this as sort of a greenhouse in a way using that analogy for what Parler is here we bring in some of these ideas. And then Parler is a place where these ideas are nurtured and fed these conspiracy theories, this misinformation, they're nurtured and fed without any opposition from the outside environment.

 

Michael Simeone  31:01

Yeah, and I think, again, that opposition is, is important. All of the different themes, and even linking to these different domains can be found on other platforms. But when you see what we're observing in Parler, which is linking to these platforms in an uncontested way. That,  it really starts to look like a monoculture. And there's not a lot of dialogue or contestation going on here.

 

Shawn Walker  31:31

Nor are you going to be sort of serendipitously or accidentally exposed to conflicting ideas. So even if you're kind of floating around on Twitter, or floating around on Facebook, a post that's contrary to your ideas, is you're probably going to experience that somewhere. And that's going to pop into your feed maybe quite often. But we're not going to see that within Parler because of how probably to kind of walled off and these alternative voices that might not agree with you. They're not there.

 

Michael Simeone  31:55

Yeah. And I mean, you think about what on our social media platform, what are some of the safeguards against something become a kind of positive feedback loop for extremism? One  of them is content modeling. And another one is having some kind of peer check on on thinking or behavior, right? Or put it away, contest or conversation, right? If we want to believe that such a thing as even possible on social media anymore, right. But if you're in in a place where you're actually self-selecting, to be there, because you're thinking a particular way, or because you feel like you don't want to participate in a certain kind of conversation and only want to participate in another and there's no content moderation, then those are that's blowing air into a fire.

 

Shawn Walker  32:39

Well, maybe pouring gasoline or maybe entire semi full of gasoline into the fire. But I think content moderation is an important concept here both the lack of content moderation and Parler, but also how content moderation on other platforms drove folks to Parler. So we can think of content moderation is these actions that platforms take to regulate content that's happening that could be users report the content of the platform, platform has employees that might look over that content or contractors on my look and review those content, that content and how that connects to their guidelines. Or they might have algorithms that might automatically flag content as being problematic. So one platform, Parler. So one Parler was known as a platform with little to no content, moderation. There was some content moderation that happened. But as some of the folks at NYU have published on, it's, you know, it was really not active at all. It was just blatant horrific content that was moderated. That was it. Versus other platforms. They're doing some activity to deal with missing disinformation, problematic content, whether that's effective or not, of course, we've done some episodes on that. But in Parler, that wasn't happening. But then other users felt that they were moderated because they were peddling these conspiracy theories or misinformation about COVID, or misinformation about the election. So then whatever their content was removed, because it was untrue. Then they leave the platform like Twitter or Facebook, and then they come to Parler.

 

Michael Simeone  34:06

And I think Parler is such an interesting case. Because, if again, you know, you use the language of a greenhouse, we're not talking about some kind of forum, like a .WIN forum, that is more on a kind of an obscure corner of the internet. 

 

Shawn Walker  34:23

So what is what is .WIN? What do you mean by that?

 

Michael Simeone  34:26

A .WIN Forum is a kind of collection of different kinds of conservative partisan sites like the Donald.WIN, or the new Patriot.win websites, where you could kind of reliably find, you know, so this used to be, I think these folks who participated in Reddit threads or Reddit communities dedicated to the Donald, right or other kinds of like more conservative themes ended up moving to these .WIN sites. Just long story short, these are again, like I don't think that these are household names. And I'm not trying to say that Parler is a household name necessarily, but the people many people who post on Parler and engage on Parler are household names. And so when household name political figures use Parler to raise money, or to garner political support, or to post some of their ideas, or to rally people around their cause, all of a sudden we have this concoction of mainstream political figures, engaging with incredibly partisan, inflammatory and almost apocalyptic thinking in the community on Parler.

 

Shawn Walker  35:37

So what are we talking about? Like these are the Devin Nunez's, the Paul Gosar's, the Andy Biggs, the Rudy Giuliani's?

 

Michael Simeone 35:46

So what we get with Parler then is, you know, an interesting combination, where you have a lot of ideas or dynamics are more obscure corners of the internet in terms of extremism or incubating really inflammatory and unopposed partisan ideas and conspiracies. But they're liaising with mainstream political figures. People like the son of the President of the United States had accounts on Parler. State representatives and Senators had accounts on Parler. Donald Trump's campaign did fundraising on Parler.

 

Shawn Walker  36:24

So even in our backyard, right, like Paul Gosar, Andy Biggs had very popular and active Parler accounts that received engagements in the hundreds of thousands per day.

 

Michael Simeone  36:34

Yep. So you start to understand that it's not just that there's these crazy ideas going on on Parler or however you want to characterize it. But that liaising with a community that has convinced or that many are convinced that an entire epoch in history is coming to a close, right, that you're living at this kind of apocalyptic fulcrum in time, that that entire community is actually beneficial to public political figures.

 

Shawn Walker  37:07

And by having these famous, is that fair to say, political figures, infamous political figures, move to these platforms, they legitimize these platforms, because this is a space that my elected representative communicates with me. And so therefore, this must be a valid place to have conversations about this. And they're agreeing with me. I mean, one of the points I think we really can’t drive home aren't enough is that the the types of discussions the language that was used, the sort of more extremist language, the incitement is different in Parler than what we see in Twitter. So we did an analysis of the Twitter accounts for those 147 Members of Congress that objected to certifying the 2020 election. And if we look at their Twitter accounts, we found kind of everyday politics, right. 

 

Michael Simeone

Yeah. 

 

Shawn Walker

Just like talking about taxes, talking about policy talking about, you know, members of the military. 

 

Michael Simeone 38:05

Extending congratulations, extending condolences, basic stuff.

 

Shawn Walker  38:08

 Couple comments about January 6, but not much. But then that language does not then get mirrored in Parler. In Parler we're talking about the election is fraudulent, the, you know, in even congratulations about January 6th, other kinds of things that so much more extreme language happened in Parler. And I think a lot of members of the public who weren't on Parler, kind of think they're the same thing. But they're, they're really different.

 

Michael Simeone 38:31

Yeah. And I think this is the you know, it's an important lesson to learn from Parler, right is it. Is it's playing an important kind of glue role. In that you can't just say, 'Oh, look at what all those crazy people on Parler are saying, they're just over, they're off in their own world'. They're not. Parler is a kind of connective tissue between some of that thinking, that positive feedback loop, that apocalyptic worldview, that all this bad stuff is happening, and there's no way out. And that the most important thing to do is to fight back. Those ideas, get to rub shoulders, with public political figures, and even receive validation.

 

Shawn Walker  39:07

So we can see Parler in the middle, maybe like subreddit, like our conspiracy other places that folks go in there and like, 'Whoa, this is a little much'.

 

Michael Simeone 39:16

Or, or name whatever post you want from Gab or Rumble.

 

Shawn Walker  39:20

Right. And so Parler stands in the middle where members of Congress, famous political figures, other folks on the right, meet those ideas and you know, rub shoulders, engage with them.

 

Michael Simeone  39:33

Yes. And that's why it's important to think about Parler as having an important role in the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Because you see some of the most, some important components of what it's going to take to mobilize people to behave in that way. You see them on Parler, right? If if we don't have this kind of thinking and behavior sanctioned by public political figures, right, it doesn't have the same likelihood of bubbling up in the way that it did?

 

Shawn Walker  40:02

So this grease is the movement of some of these ideas on the extreme fringe to moving closer and closer to legitimacy.

 

Michael Simeone 40:10

Yeah, yeah. And I think this goes back to this idea, right. Like, I hope that in this conversation, we've been able to help characterize some of the the high level things that got talked about a lot on Parler, right? But, but what we don't want to do by talking about them and by pointing out how partisan and extreme they are, both in the content that got shared, and the things that got talked about is that it's some kind of faraway place, where only the most politically extreme people think and communicate. That it plays a really interesting role of connecting that kind of thinking to more public political figures. And then we can't just roundly dismiss it as just crazy stuff.

 

Shawn Walker  40:46

So on one level, we can't dismiss it. But on another level, does this represent all Republicans?

 

Michael Simeone 40:52

No, I mean, I think we want to avoid, we want to avoid that. Right. And we're, you know, as we, as we talked about, we don't want any social media sample of any kind to be like, you know, some kind of X-ray into the way that all people are thinking.

 

Shawn Walker  41:06

Right, so this represents something substantial. But this is not representative of the general population. 

 

Michael Simeone

Yeah. 

 

Shawn Walker

We know, we know, the activities that were taking place on Parler, we know especially the content that people were posting on Parler that users are probably were posting and engaging with. But that is an important component. But that isn't every Republican, every Democrat, every person in the US or internationally. Right.

 

Michael Simeone  41:32

Right. But I mean, it's, it's important that it's not no one either. You know, that there is there's an important mass of people who are kind of resonating and trafficking these ideas. And that, you know, again, you add up all of this stuff together. And it's no surprise that one of the outcomes recommended was to recommend it over and over again on the platform is to, “Stand up and fight” because the world that is created in Parler, the worldview of Parler is that the American way of life is ending because of the virus, because of the fake election, because of Antifa. Because because, because because of big tech, right? All of these things are ending American life as we know it. And that is a huge emergency. And something's got to give, someone has to stand up and fight back.

 

Shawn Walker  42:24

And that language has specific meaning to many of the groups that are on Parler, like Oath  Keepers, Three Precenters, right? That that language might mean something different to the general public, right? Like we just talked about with the for the people and other things. That might mean one thing in our general consciousness, but these groups, especially that we're on Parler, that is incitement language, right? 

 

Michael Simeone  42:45

Oh, yeah. And you know, not for nothing.

 

Shawn Walker  42:46

The call to action? 

 

Michael Simeone 42:47

Yeah. And it's, I think it's important to, to also bring up right this something that we didn't quite get to when we're talking about some of the content on Parler, but the Three Percenters on the Proud Boys recruit like crazy on Parler. And those are both white supremacist organizations that are explicitly implicitly, totally militant.

 

Shawn Walker  43:05

Or their white supremacist, their anti immigrant, nativist organizations,  that…and many of them are armed and members of militias, we see the Oath Keepers, and their interactions with BLM, Black Lives Matter, we see that, you know, they bring guns to the protests. Right? So those are the audiences that these politicians that legitimize the platform we're talking to, and they know that that's us on this platform.

 

Michael Simeone  43:32

So that's been our summary of the Middle Ages of Parler, it's not really a it's not really a happy conversation. But I think it points to like, like an important zone of activity that has been very influential over the last year.

 

Shawn Walker  43:49

Yes, and I think, you know, the report that we're discussing that this is a component of right, this is a larger report that contextualizes a lot of this, but we're focusing on a lot of the data analysis that we did, and what we can learn and what we can't learn from Parler as a platform, because we don't want to say that it's everything, but we also can't dismiss it. It's it's as important a piece in like a workflow, if we kind of think about it, this set of chain that kind of change everything together at it, as you said.

 

Michael Simeone  44:15

Yeah. And I think the last thing, kind of my last thought on this is it's important to think about how like unique Parler was during this period of time, you know, what Parler will be as a platform is probably going to be different than what it is now. And it's important for us, I think, to pay attention to different platforms if they're more mainstream or not. But just all platforms go through transformations, right. And they carry different kinds of water at different points in time. And so I think it's important to think about something like Parler is something that's always going to end that's going to play different roles all the time. And I think it's important to think about Twitter or Facebook as things that are going to evolve as well. And so to just pay attention to not what platform it is, but also kind of where we're at, and what what some of the kind of policies and behaviors of this platform  are kind of doing it at a given time. I think all these things are worth paying attention to if we're studying misinformation and doing misinformation research is that these are dynamic characters, these platforms they change over time.

 

Shawn Walker  45:11

Right? Because if we look at today, there are other platforms that have taken Parlers place and their norms change the conversation a bit too. So we have different textures now and we also have a different sort of context post January 6th than we did pre January 6th.

 

Michael Simeone  45:25

Yeah, I think that's a good place to end. So thank you for joining us on our first episode of our third season, be thoughtful and be well.