I used Gab. But this was the screen today:
Gab has spent the past 48 hours proudly working with the DOJ and FBI to bring justice to an alleged terrorist. Because of the data we provided, they now have plenty of evidence for their case. In the midst of this Gab has been no-platformed by essential internet infrastructure providers at every level. We are the most censored, smeared, and no-platformed startup in history, which means we are a threat to the media and to the Silicon Valley Oligarchy.
Gab isn’t going anywhere.
It doesn’t matter what you write. It doesn’t matter what the sophist talking heads say on TV. It doesn’t matter what verified nobodies say on Twitter. We have plenty of options, resources, and support. We will exercise every possible avenue to keep Gab online and defend free speech and individual liberty for all people.
You have all just made Gab a nationally recognized brand as the home of free speech online at a time when Silicon Valley is stifling political speech they disagree with to interfere in a US election.
The internet is not reality. TV is not reality. 80% of normal everyday people agree with Gab and support free expression and liberty. The online outrage mob and mainstream media spin machine are the minority opinion. People are waking up, so please keep pointing the finger at a social network instead of pointing the finger at the alleged shooter who holds sole responsibility for his actions.
No-platform us all you want. Ban us all you want. Smear us all you want.
You can’t stop an idea.
As we transition to a new hosting provider Gab will be inaccessible for a period of time. We are working around the clock to get Gab.com back online. Thank you and remember to speak freely.
Andrew Torba, CEO Gab.com
…..Hostile Yahoo article
Who is Gab founder Andrew Torba?
The murder of 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue Saturday has brought new attention to Gab, the social media service that bills itself as pro-free speech and serves as a gathering place for white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other extremist figures online, and counted among its users suspected gunman Robert Bowers.
Shortly before Bowers attacked the Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill, Pa., he posted to Gab. “Screw your optics, I’m going in,” he wrote to an audience that included white nationalists, some of whom had been kicked off mainstream sites like Twitter and Facebook and joined Gab, which was founded in August 2016.
According to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, approximately 635,000 people were registered on Gab as of Sept. 10, 2018. By comparison, Twitter boasted an average of 326 million monthly active users during approximately the same time period.
Bowers’s Gab profile was quickly suspended after the site’s administrators were alerted to a verified account linked to the suspected gunman. But the backlash cost the site its cloud host, Joyent, and domain provider, GoDaddy, and as of Monday afternoon, it was offline. PayPal banned Gab a few hours after the shooting, stating that they were in “process of canceling the site’s account before today’s tragic events occurred.” (Stripe, another payment processing company, also dropped the platform.) Gab posted its initial response to the shooting on Medium, but the publishing site has also now suspended the company’s account.
“Gab isn’t going anywhere,” the company’s founder and CEO Andrew Torba declared in a statement posted to the site’s now deactivated homepage. “We will exercise every possible avenue to keep Gab online and defend free speech and individual liberty for all people.”
Torba, who was just 25 when he launched Gab, is the former CEO of an advertising technology company called Kuhcoon (later renamed Automate Ads), which he created from his home in Scranton, Pa., in 2011. Torba moved to California in late 2014, when his startup was picked for the Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley incubator. Friends told Bloomberg News that, as a political conservative, he felt out of place in Silicon Valley. In various interviews, Torba has explained that he was motivated to create Gab during the 2016 presidential election after reading reports that major social media companies like Facebook may unfairly promote posts and topics discussed by liberal users over conservative ones.
“I didn’t set out to build a ‘conservative social network’ by any means, but I felt that it was time for a conservative leader to step up and to provide a forum where anybody can come and speak freely without fear of censorship,” Torba told the Washington Post in November 2016.
“Every major communication outlet, every major social network, is run, owned, controlled and operated by progressive [ = leftist] leaders, progressive workers in Silicon Valley,” he said.
Shortly after the election, Torba further alienated himself from many of his peers, getting kicked out of a Y Combinator online alumni group for directing profane, anti-immigrant language at other members.
Torba, a Trump supporter and self-described “conservative Republican Christian,” has maintained that Gab’s mission is to facilitate free speech online and that supporters of all ideologies are welcome. Nonetheless, Gab immediately attracted users from the far right, including a number of well-known alt-right, extremist, and fringe figures, such as Richard Spencer, Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones, who were losing their mainstream social media platforms around the time Torba launched Gab.
“It’s hard for me to dissociate Gab from the reason it was founded, which was quote-unquote left wing censorship,” said Keegan Hankes, an expert on online extremism at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Hankes says Torba established Gab to give a platform to “the most extreme hate groups, leaders and extremists being purged from major social media platforms for blatantly inappropriate and harmful behavior.”
“He looked at that and created a home for those people to come live in, and he knew it,” said Hankes. “The type of behavior [Y Combinator] threw him off for is kind of the type of behavior that is definitely a core part of Gab.”
“The biggest thing about it is there are basically no rules. You can go on there and say anything you want virtually, no matter how disgusting or vitriolic or ultimately dangerous,” Hankes said, adding that the swift suspension of Bowers’s account on Saturday was “the first time I’ve seen them do it willingly, in a proactive way.”
Hankes noted that Torba — who appears to make all the decisions about moderating content on Gab — has only been moved to remove particularly offensive or threatening posts from the site on a couple of occasions, and only in response to threats from online hosting providers.
“That, I think, illustrates how far he’s willing to take this kind of free speech absolutism, and of course that’s why you have every major hate group leader on there, using it,” said Hankes.
…..Alex Jones interviews Torba on Gab and the Pittsburgh “shooting”
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