I really liked some of Gab's features when it was relatively new, especially the more advanced and fine-grained "self-censorship" tools that allowed you to do things like establish a blacklist of words that hid posts from you.
Once they tied the growth of the platform to a political ideology, I did what I could to try to increase diversity of opinion there. It didn't seem to work; Gab has become the far-right version of Reddit's /r/politics.
I've joined most of the social networks that pop up and check them out. Gab was bad at launch with crap, but trolls get tired when after awhile. Gab isn't even close to racist posters like voat hazing new people with crude/racist shock posts.
I think Gab offered a censored version to appease google store, but was still refused.
I find it amusing, that people create opensource software use diversity open source licenses, then exclude people that disagree over anything.
I find the best censorship is one that follows US law, because death threats will get you banned, and racists/trolls normally end up making one.
It started as a free speech Twitter alternative aimed at republicans. But along with republicans and free speech activists they've attracted right-leaning extremists that were banned from Twitter for a plethora of good reasons. As a result of those users being left unmoderated, Gab gained a certain reputation.
Gab's apps weren't accepted to either app store, they were booted by several hosting companies, had to switch domain registrar and their stripe account was suspended. Switch to a Mastodon fork is a recent development.
Gab is a far right platform that moderates away anything left of Rush Limbaugh. They were upset that Reddit banned some really terrible and often times illegal acts from their platform. So they moved to their own platform. Their community is very open to fringe talk, hate speech as a form of free speech, and doxxing. A link for reference but far from the only instance.
What I know of the communities in the article leads me to believe that there isn't much overlap between them and the crowd that supports the EFF and Tor.
Gab is an interesting study in and of itself. I have an account there and really wanted it to succeed - I even advocated on their behalf across the diverse range of communities in which I participate when they launched a set of more advanced content filtering capabilities than Twitter. Sadly, they seemed to have been quickly branded as "alt-Right" when Milo was banned from Twitter, and I've since given up trying to attract more diversity of opinion to the platform. I don't think I've logged on there more than once in the past year or so.
I wonder if a social media site marketed as a "free speech" platform will become something center left and right people actually use rather than a haven for psychotic racists.
I do not think Gab should be shut down or anything, but just take a look at the average post there.
When it was full of Nazis the place was intolerable because they harassed everyone that wasn't extreme. I never stuck around for that because the user experience was very poor. Those guys were assholes.
It's pretty tame right now by Gab standards. The influx of people after Parler was kicked off AWS really calmed the place down.
I haven't seen a Nazi since I signed up again a few months ago. There's even routinely people going around telling the open racists to stop being racist.
Because the people there are far right. When you go to a website and the first thing you see is calls to murder jewish people and the n-word repeated ad nauseam, all but the far right decide to just leave. The end result is that gab/parler/etc don't become places where all speech exists but instead places where extreme racism, homophobia, and sexism suck the oxygen away from everything else.
Gab (and Voat, and, er, Hatreon) were open attempts to create far-right versions of existing websites. I don't think they're good examples of the inevitability of hatred.
I'd hazard a guess that many more people are angry about hate speech on Reddit than about hate speech over email. The difference is that one is a company and the other is a federated standard. If I've understood Tim Berners-Lee correctly, he wants to replace Twitter with a million Mastodon instances rather than a hundred different versions of "Twitter, but for the far-right/far-left/radical-centrists".
and why does that matter? They later switched to ActivityPub/Mastodon for a bit. They still run a Mastodon fork, but defederated back in May.
Gab was also banned explicitly by URL by any app makers and in many ActivityPub libraries (you can find checks where it hashes the URL and compares it to known Gab URLs).
> a purpose-built platform for conspiracies and hate speech
We're in a bizarre world right now where you can label any opinion you don't agree with as hate speech, dehumanize police and call every conservative a literal Nazi and that's all okay now for some reason.
At some point we have to remember that historically, a lot of people who thought they were right, about slavery, homosexuality, war, abortion, polygamy, and other controversial topics, eventually came down on the wrong side of history.
The attack on speech and ideas has never been more profound. If you don't like an idea, you don't have to listen, but people are going to continue to go to fringes whenever their voices are silences. That will create more extreme platforms and more extremism, not less.
That's pretty dismissive and combative. From a neutral perspective, it looks like one of the intrinsic characteristics of Gab is that it is host to more hateful expression than other platforms. Can you give something in the way of an explanation as to why you're so confident that can't be the real reason?
"Facebook: Gab
Until I found Gab, the Facebook was left without the alternative. I still have my Facebook and my Facebook page, and I tamper with Developers console there, but the actual social side of it died for me a long time ago.
For some reason I find the Gab to be exactly what and where I want to be."
...so you're comfortable with being on a site that was founded by extreme right-wingers after Twitter kicked them off for being hatemongers? Well, have fun then.
Gab may have a large number of alt-right conspiracy nuts, but they also have a lot of users who rightfully mock those nutty people. It really is a platform for pure free speech. Unfortunately, its polarization was inevitable as Twitter and Reddit started cracking down on far-right users, leaving only pure free speech websites left for the crazies. But suggesting the website itself condones violence or sympathizes with neo-Nazis isn't accurate.
Per tptacek's comments, the founder does appear to be an asshole, but that doesn't make him a neo-Nazi.
From my own experience, Gab's founders and public facing opinions seem to support extreme, hateful content in an explicit, non-neutral manner, rather than being a neutral platform that unfortunately must host those things due to its neutrality.
I don't share any such appreciation for Gab. IMO, "free speech" in this case was a thinly veiled excuse for white supremacism, which has plenty of other homes on the internet. The developers of Gab chose to devote substantial portions of their lives to creating a platform for people who promote ethnic cleansing and the suppression of minorities. I don't think it's possible to do that without your eyes wide open, and I think that makes it a profoundly evil project.
I really liked some of Gab's features when it was relatively new, especially the more advanced and fine-grained "self-censorship" tools that allowed you to do things like establish a blacklist of words that hid posts from you.
Once they tied the growth of the platform to a political ideology, I did what I could to try to increase diversity of opinion there. It didn't seem to work; Gab has become the far-right version of Reddit's /r/politics.
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