Introducing Gab.ai: The People First Social Network

Re: oblique. That was exactly the point I was trying to make - a line where the content is not illegal per se, but is distasteful to reasonable people.

Hate speech is illegal. Does that get removed too?

So then it depends on hosting country and viewpoint - since mention of Taiwan as an independent country is illegal in China, for example.

My issue is that I see no reason why they need to grab geolocation data from my mobile GPS device (in the TOS).

Plus, they openly acknowledge that they provide any/all info in the event of what they consider 'legally actionable' activity. Which is SUPER vague. So - there's no point in yet another online network that's just like all the other ones.

We cooperate with government and law enforcement officials or private parties to enforce and comply with the law. We may disclose any information about you to government or law enforcement officials or private parties as we, in our sole discretion, believe necessary or appropriate: (i) to respond to claims, legal process (including subpoenas); (ii) to protect our property, rights and safety and the property, rights and safety of a third party or the public in general; and (iii) to stop any activity that we consider illegal or legally actionable activity.

I do sometimes wonder how much of this is made worse by keeping competing views in walled gardens. If you look at Twitter historically they've not been great at censorship.

Consequently it's easy for views you may hold abhorrent to end up in your feed, along with the typical OTT reactionary crap resulting from it being a poor medium for nuanced conversation (ie the 140 character limit).

This leads to calls on the garden maintainer to censor content, which then gets out of hand, resulting in people being banned rather than content being taken out via say, downvoting.

Having an open, distributed and federated approach means that it's harder to block content, but it's also harder for content you don't like to end up in your feed, and easier for you to censor it, rather than relying on a central authority to perform that task for you.

Being a bully was never acceptable, not recently or before the era of political correctness. I don't envy their capability of moral distortion. For the white grande superior nationalists it seems as if it's a time where critiquing and calling them out for their bigotry and moral incoherence is willingly confused with attempts of censorship and proto-fascism. When he says "shove it", it's a bitter sign of relinquishment from someone who has nothing to lose because he has no arguments anymore to fight the system that doesn't seem to exclusively cater to him anymore.