The Hack

In the aftermath of the attempted insurrection, Parler faced a flurry of events. Google and Apple dropped them from their respective app stores, and Amazon informed them that they would be shutting down their servers. Oh, and someone (@donk_enby) breached their website and extracted 56.7 TB of user data.

The Data

After the website breach, Kyle McDonald made the data available in an easily digestible CSV, alongside instructions on how to view the videos for each data point.

While this project is not interested in finding out who was at the riot, or in viewing any of the videos, you can check out other projects, such as @patr10tic’s map which visualize videos the day of the riot.

My Process

This was my first foray into R. I probably could have saved myself some time and did this in Python instead, but I’ve been wanting to pickup R for a while now. All that to say, please be kind, I am no R expert, and I’m sure there was a faster/easier way to do this, say via ggplot or ggmap. I also could not have done this without two StackExchange posts on saving Leaflet maps as PNGs and combining PNGs into a GIF.

First, I read in the CSV (which I had already converted from GMT timestamps to EST), filter it for the date I want, convert it into a simple features object (via the sf library), and then only select the points within the Capitol area of D.C.

From there, I loop over the all the timestamps, select the pertinent data, create a map from said data, and repeat. More is explained in the code comments.

The following is the createMap() function which is what utilizes Leaflet for R in making the maps.

After all of that, I get a list of the PNG file outputs and combine them into a GIF.

That’s all, folks.