GPS analysis shows users posting to Parler from US military bases: report

Prior to the far-right social media platform going offline, users of Parler included individuals who posted messages from inside U.S. military facilities, according to a new report from Vice's Motherboard.

The publication noted that the users are not necessarily active-duty service members, and could include civilian contractors as well as family members.

"But the news comes as prosecutors press charges against current and former military personnel for participating in the Capitol Hill event, and after a massive archive of Parler data showed that Parler users attended the riots," Motherboard wrote.

Motherboard explained how they obtained the data.

"Before Amazon cut-off Parler, a team of archivists managed to scrape a vast quantity of publicly available Parler data, including posts, images, videos, and usernames," Motherboard reported. "As Motherboard previously reported, a wave of hobbyists and computer scientists then pored over the data. One technologist took that wealth of information and filtered the GPS locations and some associated metadata and provided that information to Motherboard."

"Motherboard then plotted these coordinates of where Parler users had posted from onto a map and overlaid the location of U.S. military bases using an official dataset published by the Department of Transportation," Motherboard explained. "The overlay shows dozens of examples of Parler users posting from within military facilities."