It's worth noting that in its heyday --- usage on Gab appears to have plummeted, at least measured by the front page, and seems to be dominated today by bots --- the content on that page was absolutely par for the course for the front page of the site. There was even a House candidate, Paul Nehlen, who campaigned using almost identical anti-Semitic rhetoric on Gab.
You wouldn't want to leave anyone the impression that this kind of stuff was somehow buried on individual user pages on Gab. Rather, it is the raison d'etre for the whole site.
That's been reported, yes, but really the thing to know about Gab in 2018 is that it seems to be like 80% bots and 20% white supremacist UGC, which is what really makes it look more normal than it is.
You can easily find antisemitic tripe in Gab's official account. It's a site run by bigots for bigots that likes to pretend it's some neutral, principled free speech crusader. It's thoroughly, painfully obvious to any reasonable person that it's not - it's just a generic online septic tank.
Having read the article but not knowing anything about the posts themselves, I think most of this thread misses the point.
Clearly Microsoft knew it was hosting Gab and what Gab was. There's a troll argument that suggests Gab is just "free speech twitter", but of course that's not the case: I've been screenshotting the front page for months, from a random anonymous account, and every time I've done it the front page was full of horrible Islamophobic, racist, and anti-Semitic crap. That and bot content.
My point here is: everybody knows that's what Gab is. Microsoft isn't pushing back on Gab's anti-Semitism --- without anti-Semitism, there is no Gab. They had specific harm reduction problems with a pair of posts, one of which, according to this article, was a call for violence directed towards Jewish people.
Let's get real for a second here: gab courted neo-Nazis and became a refuge for anti-semitites and racists precisely because that was their target user base. Gab's pearl-clutching about anti-semitism is about as genuine as an arsonist's complaints about smoke. I will not miss gab, nor will I miss it's fetid assortment of wastrels. The best thing I can say about gab is that their pathetic shrieks at least made me laugh.
Oh, and "Free speech" has nothing to do with forced hosting for assorted terribles. This is one of the most persistent and irritating misinterpretations of the first amendment. "Free speech" covers the government and the government alone.
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.
It's probably unrealistic to expect us to stop seeing threads about this (Gab's #1 objective at this point will be to make more noise and surely something "newsworthy" will happen with them sometime soonish). But it's worth noting that we've had several recent discussions about Gab stemming from the events that occurred after the mass shooting.
Here, Jeftovic is arguing from faulty premises. Correcting those premises might not change the conclusions he draws, but they're worth fixing anyways.
While it's true that the worst speech on Gab.ai doesn't come from the operators of the site themselves, it's not true that the site operators have clean hands. Gab's (verified) Twitter account has repeatedly been screenshot posting anti-Semitic comments, and retweeting white supremacist posts from others (for instance: they pointedly RT'd a white supremacist mocking Ken White, of Popehat fame, for being the adoptive father of Asian children). Gab itself openly embraces white nationalism.
Gab is white supremacist Twitter (you might have called it "white nationalist Twitter" before whatever weird Brazilian politics thing conspired to begin its transformation into Fascist Orkut, which is where it's heading now).
That doesn't mean you have to agree it should be taken off the Internet by GoDaddy; you can form coherent arguments in either direction. But the idea that it's being taken offline solely because of the actions of its users is false. It has the users it has because those are the users its operators begged to get.
My main point is that this is a tricky subject. One that we should be very careful in regards to our actions.
If the content was so terrible on this site, why only remove it now? Why was it tolerated for so long?
Acting against gab now, seems to be more of a show than reality. All these companies are attempting to show their disdain for this behavior. But they allowed it before. And I’m sure they allow many other sources of hate to persist on their services.
I'm very familiar with Gab. I check it quite often, because I (unfortunately) used to know the CEO.
"There's fewer Nazi's" isn't the ringing endorsement you think it is. If you're on Gab and you think "this is fine", you probably should take a look in the mirror.
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?
Whatever happened to the idea that everyone should be free to speak whatever they want, no matter how wrong or ridiculous, and let the light of truth expose the charlatans?
That's one of the reasons I find true free speech platforms like Gab so refreshing. Sure, you'll even find some actual Nazis there, but it's better to just let them beclown themselves and get beat down by realists than to suppress them and force them to gather in the dark, where they can more easily pretend to be rational. BTW, you'll also find some of the best commentary on the web there, too, though you may have to hunt for it...
I don't recall running into much antisemitic tripe when I was there.
Calling Gab a white supremactist website just seems like a ridiculous over-the-top assertion without even a shred of evidence to back it up... I don't get how this isn't being called out as a blatant ad hominem attack.
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.
Gab is an English-language social media website known for its far-right userbase.[8] The site has been widely described as a "safe haven"[9] for extremists including neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and the alt-right.[10]
Gab claims to stand for free speech and individual liberty,[a][25][26] though these claims have been criticized for being a shield of the alt-right ecosystem.[19][22] Antisemitism is a prominent part of the site's content,[28] and the platform itself has engaged in antisemitic commentary.[23][29] Researchers have written that Gab is "known to be hateful".[30]
I take a view as a paraphrase Sid Meier's Alpha Centuari "Evil lurks onlibe as it has lurked in the streets but it never was the streets which were evil."
Gab is significant because its niche was essentially "Twitter for bigots who are too stupid to dog-whistle." It is the community that is the problem.
You wouldn't want to leave anyone the impression that this kind of stuff was somehow buried on individual user pages on Gab. Rather, it is the raison d'etre for the whole site.
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