More than a mob: Parler as preparatory media for the U.S. Capitol storming

Abstract

On 6 January 2021, a violent mob attacked the United States Capitol. Yet while mob suggests a chaotic and fragmented crowd, networked media had already been working to provide it with “just enough” cohesion, transforming it into a more dangerous political body. This article conceptualizes this preparatory media by examining the “free speech” social media network Parler, drawing on a corpus of ∼350,000 posts from the days leading up to and including the attack. This material empirically demonstrates how media worked to forge connections between disparate camps, to incite participants toward violent activity, and to legitimize this attack as moral or even spiritual. Preparatory media frames events, establishes targets, and sets agendas, providing a degree of order and working against disaggregation online. This temporary stabilization contributes to a more mobilized and organized public body. Rather than prosocial or emancipatory, the Capitol storming demonstrates the far darker potential of this work. Understanding this role of media and intervening within these logics provides one component for preventing future attacks.

#Scamdemic, #Plandemic, or #Scaredemic: What Parler Social Media Platform Tells Us about COVID-19 Vaccine

“…The study conceptualized Parler as a preparatory media that is used for incitement, legitimating, and mobilizing users. Preparatory media plays an active role in framing events, identifying target audiences, setting agendas, and ensuring that all ideas shared on the platform are not divergent from the primary goal [45]. While the findings of these studies reveal that mainstream and new social media platforms easily spread misinformation and conspiracy theories around socio-political and health issues, to the researchers' knowledge, our study is the first to examine parleys to understand COVID-19 vaccine discussions.…”

“…Further, users mainly share content related to U.S. politics, specifically in support of Donald Trump and his efforts during the 2020 U.S. elections, as well as conspiracy theories generated by groups such as QAnon. Another study by Munn [45] examined 350,000 parleys shortly before and during the 6 January 2021 U.S. Capitol riots. The study conceptualized Parler as a preparatory media that is used for incitement, legitimating, and mobilizing users.…”

Finding Qs: Profiling QAnon Supporters on Parler

“…There is a growing interest in computational social science to research the behavior of fringe communities at Gab (Ali et al 2021;Zannettou et al 2018), 4chan (Hine et al 2017Papasavva et al 2020), Voat (Papasavva et al 2021), BitChute (Trujillo et al 2020), Gettr (Paudel et al 2021), or Parler (Aliapoulios et al 2021;Baines, Ittefaq, and Abwao 2021;Jakubik et al 2022;Munn 2021;Otala et al 2021;Pieroni et al 2021). In this work, we focus on Parler due to its alleged role in inciting violence, disseminating extreme far-right content (Aliapoulios et al 2021;Hitkul et al 2021), and its relevance for hosting conspiracy theories as is the case for QAnon (Aliapoulios et al 2021).…”

“…The Parler community is characterized by extreme viewpoints and accused of partially coordinating the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 (Aliapoulios et al 2021). Parler is subject to heavy political polarization (Munn 2021;Otala et al 2021). In fact, previous research has shown that many politicians from the Republican Party, as well as their followers, migrated from Twitter to Parler during the 2020 U.S. presidential election and around the storming of the U.S. Capitol (Otala et al 2021) dissatisfied with increasing content moderation on Twitter.…”

An Early Look at the Gettr Social Network

“…In particular, we have seen the emergence of a number of alternative platforms that promise to promote free speech and allows their users to express themselves without fear of moderation. Well-known examples include Parler [4,8,14] and Gab [10,25]. While these platforms do not have the audience of mainstream social networks like Twitter and Facebook, they constitute an important piece in the information ecosystem, and it is important for the research community to understand their influence in discussing news stories, popular events, as well as conspiracy theories and misinformation.…”