A Large Open Dataset from the Parler Social Network

Aliapoulios, Max; Bevensee, Emmi; Blackburn, Jeremy; Bradlyn, Barry; Cristofaro, Emiliano De; Stringhini, Gianluca; Zannettou, Savvas

doi:10.1609/icwsm.v15i1.18117

Cited by 18 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…In this paper, we address these limitations in the context of a high-profile deplatforming event: the suspension of the US social networking service Parler from Amazon’s Web hosting services on 2021 January 11, following the US Capitol attack. At the time, Parler was associated with conspiracy theorists and far-right extremists ( 7 ) and had around 2.3 million daily active users ( 1 ). During the shutdown, Parler users were reported to have migrated to other fringe social media such as Rumble, Gab, and Telegram.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deplatforming did not decrease Parler users’ activity on fringe social media

et al. 2023

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Online platforms have banned (“deplatformed”) influencers, communities, and even entire websites to reduce content deemed harmful. Deplatformed users often migrate to alternative platforms, which raises concerns about the effectiveness of deplatforming. Here, we study the deplatforming of Parler, a fringe social media platform, between 2020 January 11 and 2021 February 25, in the aftermath of the US Capitol riot. Using two large panels that capture longitudinal user-level activity across mainstream and fringe social media content (N = 112, 705, adjusted to be representative of US desktop and mobile users), we find that other fringe social media, such as Gab and Rumble, prospered after Parler’s deplatforming. Further, the overall activity on fringe social media increased while Parler was offline. Using a difference-in-differences analysis (N = 996), we then identify the causal effect of deplatforming on active Parler users, finding that deplatforming increased the probability of daily activity across other fringe social media in early 2021 by 10.9 percentage points (pp) (95% CI [5.9 pp, 15.9 pp]) on desktop devices, and by 15.9 pp (95% CI [10.2 pp, 21.7 pp]) on mobile devices, without decreasing activity on fringe social media in general (including Parler). Our results indicate that the isolated deplatforming of a major fringe platform was ineffective at reducing overall user activity on fringe social media.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deplatforming did not decrease Parler users’ activity on fringe social media

et al. 2023

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“…Similar platformwide datasets are available for other platforms, most notably the Pushshift.io Reddit dataset (Baumgartner et al 2020). Unlike Reddit, BitChute is part of the alt-tech space and fits into a constellation of recent work studying these alternative spaces, including releases from Parler (Aliapoulios et al 2021), Gab (Fair and Wesslen 2019), and Mastodon (Zignani et al 2019). Paralleling YouTube's centrality in the mainstream information ecosystem, BitChute and its videohosting is likewise a core element of the alt-tech space and is often a highly shared domain in other fringe platforms and Telegram channels.…”

Section: Related Datasetsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The MeLa BitChute Dataset

Trujillo

Gruppi

Buntain

et al. 2022

ICWSM

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In this paper we present a near-complete dataset of over 3M videos from 61K channels over 2.5 years (June 2019 to December 2021) from the social video hosting platform BitChute, a commonly used alternative to YouTube. Additionally, we include a variety of video-level metadata, including comments, channel descriptions, and views for each video. The MeLa-BitChute dataset can be found at: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/KRD1VS.

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“…During that time, the conspiracy grew, even creating its own archiving sites to store information about the conspiracy and Q drops [33], and hosting online forums for adherents to have a "safe space" to discuss their ideas. 4 Although QAnon is known for various crimes its adherents committed [24], the most well-known QAnon crime was the attack on the United States Capitol [5]. On January 6, 2021, QAnon adherents and Donald Trump supporters stormed the US capitol in an attempt to reinstate Donald Trump as the US president.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Shortly after, many mainstream social networks took action to ban QAnon discussions from their platforms [9]. At the same time, other alternative social networks were banned by their hosting providers, like Parler [4].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Waiting for Q: An Exploration of QAnon Users' Online Migration to Poal in the Wake of Voat's Demise

Papasavva¹,

Mariconti²

2023

Preprint

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Many controversial and hateful online communities on mainstream social networks get banned due to moderation efforts. One of the platforms known to have taken such measures is Reddit, which banned various communities and users in recent years. Although banning these communities eliminates the problem on one platform, the participants of those communities often tend to regroup on other, laxer alternative social networks. One alternative to Reddit was Voat, a Reddit-like social network that allowed its users to share their controversial ideas freely. Voat bloomed and became more popular with every Reddit ban and, although it had a troubled history, it managed to stay afloat for four years before shutting down in December 2020.In this work, we investigate the Voat shutdown and how the users of the conspiracy theory QAnon organized their online migration. We find that many users proposed Poal as a Voat alternative, resulting in about half of the QAnon user base of Voat migrating there. In addition, we find that only a few Voat users lost hope close to the end of Voat, turning against Q, while others encouraged their fellow conspiracy adherents to "wait for Q" to tell them where to go. Lastly, we find evidence that shortly after the Voat shutdown, users on Poal (most of them Voat migrants), start discussing and planning the January 6th, 2021 attack on the US Capitol.

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A Large Open Dataset from the Parler Social Network

Cited by 18 publications

References 12 publications

Deplatforming did not decrease Parler users’ activity on fringe social media

Deplatforming did not decrease Parler users’ activity on fringe social media

The MeLa BitChute Dataset

Waiting for Q: An Exploration of QAnon Users' Online Migration to Poal in the Wake of Voat's Demise

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