An Early Look at the Parler Online Social Network

Abstract

Parler is as an alternative social network promoting itself as a service that allows its users to "Speak freely and express yourself openly, without fear of being deplatformed for your views." Because of this promise, the platform become popular among users who were suspended on mainstream social networks for violating their terms of service, as well as those fearing censorship. In particular, the service was endorsed by several conservative public figures, encouraging people to migrate there from traditional social networks. After the events of January 6 2021, Parler has been progressively deplatformed, with its app being removed from popular mobile stores and the entire website being taken down by their hosting provider. In this paper, we provide the first data-driven characterization of Parler. We collected 120M posts from 2.1M users posted between 2018 and 2020 as well as metadata from 12M user profiles. We find that the platform has witnessed large influxes of new users after being endorsed by popular figures, as well as a reaction to the 2020 US Presidential Election. We also find that discussion on the platform is dominated by conservative topics, President Trump, as well as conspiracy theories like QAnon.