What Parler Saw During the Attack on the Capitol

https://projects.propublica.org/parler-capitol-videos/

by Borlands • 6 years ago

80 33 6 years ago

projects.propublica.org

mmastrac• 6 years ago

Politics aside, is this potentially one of the most comprehensive multi-vantage-point training video datasets available today? I cannot imagine another that contains such a multitude of 1) videos shooters, 2) positions, 3) actual humans and 4) temporal start/end times.

abcanthur• 6 years ago

I would imagine so, great multiangle dataset w crowd sourced labels. Grim, but I do look forward to the meeting of all those videos and a "matterport" style reconstruction. I assume the Nytimes is paying some studio to do this right now.

rasz• 6 years ago

Now imagine letting lose SfM and tracking algorithms on this video dataset and reconstructing full temporal 3D model of the event ala Enemy of the State (1998). Add in some of [1] and we could reconstruct full Cyberpunk 2077 Braindance.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.04826.pdf VoiceFilter: Targeted Voice Separation by Speaker-Conditioned Spectrogram Masking

trident50002• 6 years ago

This is great but its been posted 5 times in the last 2 days.

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=propublica.org

Regardless, Id like to see this with other events as well, even casual events.

hajile5• 6 years ago

Five times and no comments on anything. I wonder why such a trove isn't worthy of discussion?

I suspect because if people watched those videos, they'd come away with a very different perspective. Pretty much all you see is people standing around waving signs and chanting -- literally textbook non-violent protesting. Once you see them enter the Capital, you still don't see waves of violence and destruction. There are a couple-dozen aggressive/violent people at most (and those people should definitely be arrested and charged).

In contrast, I've seen hundreds of videos of other riots throughout the year where you get hundreds of videos of the violence (along with the videos of people getting chased down and beaten up for violating the "no cameras rule" because they don't want to be filmed doing horrible things. Most of those didn't have large groups just standing around waving signs and chanting -- almost everyone was involved in the violence and destruction. There was an interesting article I read that the riots this year caused more property damage than any in US history by property insurance claims. That's not including people hurt/killed, all the property damages under 10-20k per building where it costs more to file than to pay out of pocket, vehicles totaled, government buildings ruined (that the people's taxes have to pay to repair), etc.

As I said before, I have zero tolerance for the violent people at the Capital. I also have zero tolerance for those beating up and hospitalizing thousands (probably tens of thousands) throughout the summer. This is in stark contrast to most news organizations and even prominent politicians who stated that the massive violent protest was a necessary and acceptable idea while then decrying the couple dozen violent protestors at the Capital as the basest kind of evil when all of it was evil political violence and was all wrong.

trident50002• 6 years ago

This is exactly what I was thinking when I watched the videos. It stands in stark contrast to the media narrative.

steve_adams_862• 6 years ago

I agree. For days I thought perhaps hundreds had been protesting. I was blown away to hear it was thousands, and immediately realized that the media was latching onto perhaps dozens of bad apples, so to speak.

I think it’s plain to see that most Americans don’t want to murder politicians. The Republican voters who feel disenfranchised aren’t all sharpening their axes right now.

I think it’s insane what happened. It just isn’t representative of republicans.

Not sure what to do with that. I’m Canadian so I suppose it doesn’t matter much. I only see what the media gives me and I don’t personally know a lot of Americans, let alone republicans.

IfOnlyYouKnew• 6 years ago

Storming parliament is fundamentally different from walking down some street with signs.

That's true even if the same amount of violence somehow happens at those events.

Which it didn't: These people had functioning gallows, yelled "kill Mike Pence", actually beat a police officer to death, managed to trample four of their own to death, brought zip-ties to take hostages, etc.

And you consider that peaceful?

kthejoker22• 6 years ago

Most of those didn't have large groups just standing around waving signs and chanting -- almost everyone was involved in the violence and destruction

This is demonstrably false, and you should retract it.

Second, it is qualitatively different to riot and break into one of our main bodies of government and threaten the lives of anyone (even if it was just a select few out of the larger whole) during an important part of the process of our peaceful transition of power. To simply equate this rioting to this summer's protests (and yes riots) and say "it's all wrong" is to almost miss the point entirely about what the impact, the risks, and the response to these two things should be.

And while I would broadly agree that most of the content collected here is of angry, mostly harmless (and willfully misinformed) constituents asking for their voice to be heard, what I also saw was:

* Largely unanimous support for attacking the police, breaking and entering into the Capitol, people cheering and laughing at everyone trespassing, breaking barricades. Definitely no signs of disapproval or concern for the police, the Congress, public property, or even the optics of the situation.

There were of course a couple of instances of "don't hurt the cops" but they were completely outnumbered by the "this is OUR HOUSE"/1776 crowd.

* If you just watch the last 2 hours of video - when the National Guard arrived, pushed people out of the building, then off the Capitol, out of the Mall, and so on - the videos turned extremely angry, negative, "f*k the police", "traitors!" etc it is absolutely clear that the only reason you have such a positive vibe about the first half of the videos is because there was such little resistance to their actions during the first half.

If there had been armed National Guard presence there from the outset, this would've been much uglier, without the "waving flags and chanting" you see.

deeviant4• 6 years ago

As I said before, I have zero tolerance for the violent people at the Capital.

As you spend your entire comment denying the huge amount of violence that happened that day. Man you are really sold on ignoring any of the violence that happened that day, aren't you?

https://d2hxwnssq7ss7g.cloudfront.net/x2GqSN2kAGY3_cvt.mp4

There are a great many more videos of violence happening that day, but really you only need one video of insurrections, in the capitol building after they broke in, fighting as a mob against an out-numbered group of frantic police officers, to conclude the event was violent. You can't have a group of people nearby or inside the capitol building literally beat a police officer to death and "undo" said violence by having a lot of people outside the building standing around outside innocently shouting, "Hang Mike Pence!"

Also, although it seemed like everybody posted every video they took that day, that probably isn't true. It's reasonable to believe that these people had some inhibition from posting videos in which their side obviously looked bad, which would bias the corpus of videos to be that much more "friendly" to the insurrectionists.

dudeithinkBLM3• 6 years ago

Doesn't exactly look worthy of losing our collective freedom of speech and right to assemble over. A stark contrast over the story being pushed in the media.

Yet this event will be used as a scapegoat to push those very things in the near future.

Just know that any laws passed or precedents set will be used first on the "radical right", will undoubtedly be used on the anti-vax and conspiracy crowd but will eventually be used on the anti-war left, and then simply "dissidents".

If you haven't realized it yet, the wheels are turning to silence unapproved narratives forever. The media campaign just screams the phrase "manufacturing consent".

deeviant4• 6 years ago

So it's not the people that participated in an seditious attack on the capital and the most cherished democratic process, the democratic choosing of the US president that are the problem here? They built gallows outside the capital, they screamed "hang Mike Pence" because he didn't literally attempt to end American democracy for them.

It's still "those other people who want to take our freedumbs away" that are the problem?

This feels a lot like the group of people whose first reaction to when a school gets massacred by yet another school shooting is, "My Second Amendment is going to be under attack now, this sucks!"

prohobo• 6 years ago

Exactly, that's how this works. They take all of our freedoms away while you cheer them on.

You know, this isn't the first time it's happened. People aren't just pulling this out of thin air. There's a very long history of these things playing out that way, time after time. We are currently in an era, since 2001, where every time the government or corporations decide to do something to "protect" us, they end up pushing us further into serfdom.

What I don't understand is how people still don't know their history, and think this time it's somehow different.

dudeithinkBLM3• 6 years ago

I'm afraid I see it differently. After years of carefully watching the media, I've realized that they do not have the citizen's best interests at heart. Whatever they're pushing, I'm intensely suspicious of.

Here's an interesting thought experiment for you to conduct:

What if these incidiary figures committing violence, egging on fellow protestors and erecting guillotines at the Capitol were actually bad actors with a nefarious agenda.

The crazier the crowd looks, the easier it is to ram through legislation that curtails the right to dissent. Personally I find it completely believable and considering the events of the last couple years, likely.

Sprbdg• 6 years ago

You don't appreciate freedom of speech until you personally lose it. That usually happens after others you don't like have already lost theirs.

dragonwriter7• 6 years ago

Doesn’t exactly look worthy of losing our collective freedom of speech and right to assemble over.

No one has suggested it is, so I’m not sure why you are beating that strawman.

dudeithinkBLM3• 6 years ago

Unfortunately it's not exactly spelled out for you like that. Can you imagine though?

As seen on a hypothetical NBC Nightly News broadcast: "The government is using its influence over corporate media to shape public opinion in an effort to remove constitutionally protected rights like free speech and the right to assemble.. Now is the time to protest if you want to have any chance at keeping them"

That would never happen. Efforts like this much more hidden and shrouded in secrecy. Out of necessity... They don't want protesting.

The theft of your most sacred rights will not be broadcasted to you before it happens. All of a sudden you'll wake up one day, and they'll be gone. Unless you resist of course.

What Parler Saw During the Attack on the Capitol

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