The article itself never defines "messages" and, from context, it seems like they referred to users' [public] posts as "users' messages" -- not DMs/PMs.
EDIT: A clarification on Twitter from ~9h ago:
"since a lot of people seem confused about this detail and there is a bullshit reddit post going around:
only things that were available publicly via the web were archived. i don't have you e-mail address, phone or credit card number. unless you posted it yourself on parler."
>I am now crawling URLs of all videos uploaded to Parler. Sequentially from latest to oldest. VIDXXX.txt files coming up, 50k chunks, there will be 1.1M URLs total: https://donk.sh/06d639b2-0252-4b1e-883b-f275eff7e792/
>This may include things from deleted/private posts.
"Private" posts are posts shared to specific circles AFAIK, not the classic definition of 1:1 DMs. They're still semi-public, a bit like Google+ Circles.
By "messages" they mean public posts directed at other people, like I'm 'messaging' you right now. It's a misleading title that was meant to sensationalize the 'hack'. It seems like all this amounted to was a simpler way to scrape public posts.
>70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers