What’s Gab? A right-wing social alternative to Twitter

• Gab is a social media platform that has become a hot spot for far-right figures such as Alex Jones, founder of Infowars, as well as white supremacist and anti-Semitic rhetoric since its launch in 2016.
• This is because it does not moderate content like Twitter – Gab markets itself as a vehicle for free speech and does not crack down on messages that are considered hateful or contain false information.
• Since its launch in 2016, Gab has been suspended by Stripe, PayPal, Amazon’s cloud hosting service, Google’s cloud platform, Apple’s app store and its former domain registrar GoDaddy for hate speech violations.
• And in 2018, the shooter of the Tree of Life Pittsburgh attack in the synagogue went to Gab to utter anti-Semitic rhetoric before killing 11 people.
• Now, after Facebook and Twitter banned President Trump from their platforms following the siege of the US Capitol, many are flocking to the right to sites like Gab – the company said it sees 10,000 new users every hour, but Apple and Google ban it has long been app stores.
• Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

As mainstream social networking sites weaken President Trump and other far-right users because they spread misinformation and incite violence, smaller fringe networks seem to be absorbing the runoff.

Gab is one of them – it was founded in 2016 as an alternative social platform for Facebook and Twitter. Its founder tried to build a place where users could accept freedom of speech and posts without moderation at a time when mainstream websites were starting to take on misinformation, efforts that coincided with Trump’s rise to the presidency.

After pro-Trump extremists violently stormed the U.S. Capitol last week, the discourse once again reigned over how social media services can radicalize and provide platforms to those who want to commit violence. It was found that the rioters had arranged on Twitter, Facebook, Parler and TheDonald weeks in advance.

Since then, Facebook has blocked Trump’s access to the site and Twitter has permanently suspended the president, and smaller sites such as Parler have been banned by Google and Apple’s app stores, as well as Amazon’s AWS service, for failing to address the threats. of violence.

Apple kicked Gab off in 2016 for hate speech offenses, as did Google and Amazon, and yet the platform has grown in popularity since its launch as one of a handful of online ecosystems that have attracted those on the edge of the country .

The company gets 10,000 new users every hour, the company reported over the weekend.

Here’s how Gab became a favorite among the alt-right.

Gab was bred out of a desire to escape Twitter’s moderation policy on false information and hate speech

Cofounder and CEO Andrew Torba told Buzzfeed News at the end of 2017 he was fed up with how big social media sites are censoring people’s postings. “What empowers the completely left-leaning Big Social monopoly to tell us what ‘news’ is and what ‘trend’ is and to define what ‘harassment’ means?” Torba said.

Gab looks a lot like Twitter and Reddit, as reported by the New York Times, and reports – called ‘gabs’, are limited to 300 characters.

The site quickly became an abyss of white supremacists, anti-Semites, and other users launched from mainstream technology platforms, such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Alex Jones, and white nationalist leader Richard B. Spencer. The site is pretended to be dedicated to all those who share in ‘the common ideals of Western values, individual freedom and the free exchange and flow of information’, but the far-right ideologies are what the small community largely populates. According to Fox Business, in April 2020 it had approximately 1 million registered users.

Jon Cherry / Getty Images

Torba posted a slap early Monday with an illustration of President Trump with an eagle on his shoulders standing next to a lion. Far-right Irish YouTuber Dave Cullen, who runs the channel Computing Forever, posted a farewell video on Monday after YouTube banned him for violating his policies. He said it would have no effect on its operation.

Cullen’s Gab bio reads: “If they do not allow you to say it, it should be said. #AllSpeechMatters.”

Like other far-right alternatives, such as Parler, Gab markets himself as committed to freedom of speech. Gab’s online rules prohibit some types of posting, such as threats of violence and illegal pornography. But other than that, it uses little moderation and does not limit postings that can generally be considered misleading or qualify as hate speech. It does give users the option to mute postings they find offensive.

The shooter in a 2018 attack on the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue used the platform to post a series of anti-Semitic messages before killing 11 people. The site went offline for a short while after the shooting, which was called the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in American history.

The shooter falsely claimed that a Jewish refugee organization “would like to bring in intruders who kill our people”, according to an archive of his posts on Gab. “I can not sit with me and watch my people being slaughtered. Screw on your optics, I’m going in.”

Matthew Hatcher / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images

Gab has been regularly banned by major technology companies since its launch in 2016

Big tech companies have limited Gab in the past, just as Google, Amazon and Apple have taken action over Parler after pro-Trump rioters stormed the U.S. capital.

In 2016, Apple blocked the Gab app over pornographic content and hate speech, and Google banned it in its Google Play store as well. Gab filed a lawsuit against Google before dropping it.

In 2017, the website’s domain registrar threatened to kick Gab out for violating hate speech laws with more racist and anti-Semitic posts. A company spokesman said the author had been removed from the posts but that he was “looking for a provider of domain registrars who support legal, politically incorrect freedom of speech. ‘

In August 2018, Microsoft threatened to launch Gab from its Azure cloud computing service over anti-Semitic posts taking revenge on Jews and the vandalism of Holocaust memorial museums. The Gab user who wrote the posts later deleted it.

After the Pittsburgh shooter was found to have placed anti-Semitic posts on Gab in 2018, PayPal announced it was banning the platform from using it as a payment option. Stripe followed shortly thereafter, as did Medium, Shopify and GoDaddy, Gab’s domain registrar. Gab soon found a new domain registrar at Epik.

And in 2019, Amazon announced that it would stop allowing Gab to raise money through its Amazon Web Services platform because the site ‘promotes content that constitutes hate speech’. Attempts have been made in advance to raise up to $ 10 million from investors.

The far right can spread more lies on Gab because the site does not moderate the content strongly – and quickly gets new users

These sites usually consider themselves free speech and say that people like Twitter are the first amendment to infringe on misinformation. But as Tyler Sonnemaker of Business Insider reported, it’s within Twitter and Gab’s rights to moderate their platforms as they see fit, as they are private enterprises. The first amendment prevents the government from censoring private citizens and businesses, not the other way around.

As mainstream websites such as Twitter and Facebook increase their implementation of moderation policies, resulting in the permanent suspension of President Trump, experts said in a previous interview with Insider that Parler and Gab could rise in popularity, where users will more easily conspire theories and false information spout.

We are already seeing this happen – Gab said on Twitter that the platform gets 10,000 new users every hour.

“Gab has gained more users in the last two days than in our first two years of existence,” the company said tweeted Sunday.

And Parler shot up to number one spot in Apple’s App Store after Facebook and Twitter deployed Trump.

However, Parler is now offline after Amazon severed ties with the service, and Parler CEO John Matze said the platform could remain in place for up to a week. Parler has filed a lawsuit against Amazon for antitrust violations, claiming the e-commerce giant’s ban is politically motivated and competitive because it did not take similar action against Twitter.

Troy Wolverton contributed to an earlier version of this report.