Monday, January 18, 2021


Hundreds of Parler videos from Capitol riot republished in chronological timeline

Jon Porter THE VERGE

ProPublica has published a new interactive resource of over 500 videos taken in Washington, DC on January 6th, the day of the Capitol riots, offering an unfiltered look at the day’s events. The videos were sourced from Parler, the social network popular with Trump’s supporters, whose database of over one million videos was archived before the service was taken offline.
© Photo Illustration by Thiago PrudĂȘncio/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

We’ve covered previous attempts to organize these videos into easy-to-view online resources, like this interactive map from Patr10tic. But what’s notable about ProPublica’s site is how easily you can scrub through a timeline of videos and sort by general location: Around DC, Near Capitol, and Inside Capitol. You can start by watching videos of crowds attending President Trump’s inflammatory speech at midday, before seeing events turn violent over the course of the afternoon.
© Screenshot: ProPublica Videos are organized chronologically, and can be filtered based on location.

It’s an eye-opening resource which captures videos of the mob’s violent actions, including vandalism and threats against lawmakers. Since the videos are organized chronologically, you’ll often see the same scene captured from multiple angles, making it much easier to see what’s actually happening despite the chaos.

In an accompanying writeup, ProPublica outlines how it ended up with the over 500 videos contained in the resource. It says it originally got the videos from an anonymous programmer who archived over 1 million clips from Parler before it went offline. ProPublica then pulled out around 2,500 videos based on the time they were uploaded and their location data. From these, its staff selected over 500 videos which they believed to be newsworthy and relevant to the day’s events.

Despite the amount of videos contained in the resource, ProPublica notes that there are some notable blindspots. For example, it only has one video from inside the Senate or House chambers, despite media footage that suggests rioters were filming inside the rooms.

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