David Icke Remember Who You Are Pdf Free 15
Chrystal Dueno
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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