But doesn't Twitter have many people saying horrible things? If gab is letting people talk about murdering people and not taking action, I'm fine with it - but is that the case?
Gab is the same but Twitter.
But for all their bitching, they are still active on both in large numbers. Both platforms really only engage in token bans.
The bigger issue I see is if when these communities become echo chambers which I think is far more toxic. Now if Gab was removing speech that was against hate speech then I think that is a major issue. I see this issue happening more on Reddit where you have community that basically have rules like "if you don't agree with xyz then you will be banned immediately." So the whole thing is an echo chamber in itself.
Also the truth is, these hate speech people aren't going to just disappear. They will persist and continue. The only solution is to counter those people, in dialogue, and keep on them about why they're wrong etc.
Even today, when the front page (unusually busy! during most of the day, there were at least six (6) stories circulating on "popular stories") is primarily about "save Gab", you are only ever one click away from fever-swamp racism; virtually everyone who comments there is a white nationalist. I've been screen-shotting Gab for months (I have weird hobbies) and one of the accounts I thought was a bot (Gab was overrun by bots, presumably to boost its traffic numbers and dilute the neo-Nazism) --- it posted garish landscape photos like clockwork every day --- also turned out to be a white nationalist. Seriously, even the inspirational landscape account is a Nazi on Gab.
But don't take the site's word for it. Listen to the site itself:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18318536
People have been screenshotting Gab.ai tweets for a year (they deleted the worst of them after yesterday's tragedy). It's not like there's any uncertainty about what they are.
Now, it is true that you can make a coherent argument for leaving sites like Gab and Stormfront alone; "more speech is antidote for bad speech", etc. But what you can't do is try to argue that Gab is just Twitter, and is being singled out unfairly. That's not what's happening. Even if Stormfront added a record review section and started doing in-depths on the new Kurt Vile album, we'd still all understand what Stormfront was. But fewer people know what Gab is, so it's a little bit more confusing.
InfoWars itself would moderate its posters.
A coherent one, but maybe also a wrong one. We've heard a lot less in the news about various de-platformed people. When was the last time Milo was in the news? https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjbp9d/do-social-...
I'm just saying: make whatever argument about de-platforming you want, and I won't feel much need to interject. But claim Gab and Twitter are comparable and I have a problem, because that is (a) not true and (b) exactly what Gab wants normies to believe.
what you can't do is try to argue that Gab is just Twitter it actively courts white supremacistsDid you look at the linked tweets?
actively courting white supremacists
There's a bit in Winnie-the-Pooh in which Pooh goes home to get a jar of honey to use as bait in a Heffalump trap.
"It had HUNNY written on it, but, just to make sure, he took off the paper cover and looked at it, and it looked just like honey. “But you never can tell,” said Pooh. “I remember my uncle saying once that he had seen cheese just this colour.” So he put his tongue in, and took a large lick. “Yes,” he said, “it is. no doubt about that. And honey, I should say, right down to the bottom of the jar. Unless, of course,” he said, “somebody put cheese in at the bottom just for a joke. Perhaps I had better go a little further... just in case... in case Heffalumps don't like cheese... same as me... Ah!” And he gave a deep sigh. “I was right. It is honey, right the way down.”"
Five year olds can easily tell this is supposed to be amusing and not a description of Pooh's good-faith effort to establish the precise contents of the jar.
Anyone who denies that it is anti-Semitic is obviously arguing in bad faith.
Let's tie it back to the original argument. It is basically argued that unlike Twitter, it's justified to deplatform Gab because their 465,000 users are "virtually everyone" white nationalists, white supremacists, and/or anti-semites (the terms are used interchangeably), and that this state of affairs is due to Gab "actively courting white supremacists".
Does Gab actively court white supremacists to join their platform? Maybe! The poster claims that he screenshots Gab as a hobby, so it should be easy to provide an example of this.
Words have meanings. "White supremacy", "White nationalism", and "anti-semitism" are not synonyms. There are very specific claims in the original argument. "Actively courts white supremacists" is a higher standard than "holds or expresses white supremacist opinions", and this claim is central to the argument justifying deplatforming Gab.
I'm commenting under my real name, in good faith.
Gab is only viewed special case because the founder stupidly marketed it as a "free speech absolutist" sort of place.
well for one, it makes it a slightly nicer place for the victims of that hate speech.
I get the drive. Circa 1994-2000, I was involved in bianca.com, the first web-based chat site and run with a strident free-speech ethos. Especially early on, the web was a pretty staid academic place, so a site where you could talk about anything was hugely novel.
It turns out that if you let people talk about anything but most other sites have certain restrictions, then your site will become known for what other sites don't accept. In 1994, that was porn. The founders didn't really set out to have site about sex, but by 1997, that's the category we won our Webby in. None of us were really exciting about running a sex site, so eventually we turned our attentions elsewhere.
These days the problem isn't porn; there's plenty of room for that on the internet. For places like Gab and 4chan, what they get is the world's worst people, the ones kicked off Twitter and Facebook. According to a study this year, Gab has much more hate speech than Twitter (although less than 4chan). [1] Given its history [2] it is not shocking at all that one of their ardent racists went out and killed a bunch of people. After the way Elliot Rodger was radicalized online, [3] nobody should be surprised that online hate turns into real-world violence.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.05287
[2] https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/ywxb95/gab-is-the-alt-rig...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Isla_Vista_killings#Manif...
It's a careful balancing act every site owner and moderator has to consider because if you're not careful the core concept of a site can quickly change and fill in the gaps your rules or moderation leaves. I've experienced this a few times personally and is why I'm always wary when people complain about censorship when they're banned or kicked off of a platform.
This isn't a 'it turns out that' - that's just Gab's narrative. It's a site that was built by actual bigots to provide a platform for other bigots. It's a substantial category error to equate them to any actual, principled free-speech efforts.
I think their intent was as stated: to create a Twitter competitor that a lot of people used for a lot of things. Yes, they they intended to be a home for bigots. But it was never a tenable business as a place that was only a home for bigots. I just don't think they understood how their differentiator would inevitably become their whole brand.
I don't see why one would think that when the evidence against is so clear. The ACLU defends Nazis in court and being a Nazi is not their whole brand. Gab's brand is what it is because they both host Nazis and sound like Nazis.
I am sure there are a lot of people who are intellectually for free speech. I'm also sure there are a lot of people who by disposition favor the dominance of certain groups that they belong to (e.g., white men). There are plenty of people in both groups, even though the position is intellectually incoherent in that maintaining dominance always involves silencing the dominated. But because they haven't done any sort of hard self-examination, they don't realize the two are in conflict.
So far it's plausible to me that Torba is that intersection, the not-very-sharp freezepeech crowd that only does anything about freedom of speech when they feel somebody like them gets yelled at. Twitter's staff was full of the "free speech wing of the free speech party" types early on, and Twitter's evolution here was a slow concession to reality.
It's surely possible that Torba in private was a goose-stepper from the get-go, and that the free speech thing was a consciously adopted cover. But if I were to bet, it'd be that he just wasn't particularly smart, and that he really believed that he could have a Twitter competitor on the basis of "freedom!", fighting those darned liberals and their hatred of free speech. Then both he and the platform gradually self-radicalized because he identified with his platform and his platform's distinguishing characteristic snowballed.
The guy identified as a lifelong "conservative Republican Christian", a segment low on self-examination and high on the ability to believe contradictory things. Around his booting from YC, he wrote, "Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling bullshit and shove it. I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a President into office, cucks." For me, that puts him near the broad end of the radicalization funnel that Bellingcat described. [1] So I read Gab's progress more as the inevitable unfolding of Torba's unchecked biases, and less about an initial conscious intent to cover up explicit beliefs.
[1] https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2018/10/11/memes-in...
Meanwhile, the current story for the genesis of Gab does not make sense. In the Gab mythology, Gab was created as a haven for ideas Twitter determined to be too dangerous for its platform. But Twitter happily plays host to conspiracy theory, Islamophobia, homophobia, misogyny, and racism. In fact, major figures in each of those buckets of hateful thought --- from the QAnon conspiracy to Pamela Gellar and Ann Coulter to Roosh V to Richard Spencer. It's not a happenstance that these people are on Twitter; they're there because Twitter does not have a policy forbidding bigotry.
What Twitter does have is a policy against harassment and violence. But, guess what? So, ostensibly, does Gab.
What deliberate purpose then does Gab serve, other than to monetize bigotry? Gab is not Bianca's Smut Shack and Torba is not a Bianca Troll.
Do you have particular evidence he's not a conservative or a Christian? He claimed to be both, and I haven't seen anything to think he wouldn't have met CPAC's or the Moral Majority's definitions of those terms when he claimed that.
Twitter had gradually been turning down the dial on awfulness for years. Many conservatives believe that liberal social media companies are biased against them, and many ardent free-speech types believe the platforms are far too fussy. I'm sure you and I agree that Twitter's hateful conduct policy [1] (which bans such things as "inciting fear about a protected category" and "repeated and/or non-consensual slurs, epithets, racist and sexist tropes, or other content that degrades someone") and their enforcement of it don't go far enough. But non-insane people could also fear that a policy like that could be misapplied given how much it depends on judgment. And they might reasonably be concerned how much further the policy tightening could go.
So again, I think the claimed purpose of Gab, could well be, in a sufficiently confused mind, the actual initial intent. A large part of the US right is no stranger to outright doublethink, after all.
And thanks, but I'm aware that Gab isn't Bianca's.
[1] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hateful-condu...
I think you're wrong in attributing any kind of good faith to Gab's message about being free speech. It's white supremacist twitter, both in intent and outcome. But we don't have to keep litigating the point.
With evidence, I'd certainly believe Torba was a cryptofascist from the get-go. There are plenty of them out there "hiding their power". But I haven't seen that evidence yet, and the way his COO, Sanduja, stuck with him from founding through a few months ago, makes me think that Torba wasn't a fourteen-words type when he started.
That said, I don't think "good faith" is what I'm describing here. Right-wing doublethink requires strong compartmentalization and a refusal to reconcile one's positions and actions. If someone ardently believes in and espouses a free speech message, but only happens to put in work when it advantages white men, are they truly free speech advocates? I'd say no. Are they lying? Also no. For me "good faith" would require sufficient self-examination that they could detect and self-correct when espoused principles contradict behavior.
So it's possible to me that Torba believed in the free-speech message sufficiently to a) espouse and promote it effectively, and b) attract other people who were entirely sincere about it. But if that's the case, I also believe he was on the path of self-radicalization when he started it, and has only gone further down that road.
Would it also be reasonable for browsers also black list the website in question "because they don't want to be associated with those things"?
One is far more benign and is simply an unopinionated tool. The other has a huge power and daya asymmetry can do anything at any time, subject only to the reputational and competition constraints. And the competition needs to build everything from scratch instead of just forking.
Guess which one always wins in the end :)
As time goes on, the Atlas Shrugged argument of “but who will want to build the next thing if you limit their upside with taxes and regulations?” will be less and less relevant. I’d like to see a society where instead of John Galts we have collaborative snowballs like Wikipedia and Science where everyone adds a tiny bit without chilling effects of intellectual property lawsuits. But how will people eat? UBI.
Like imagine if there were four browsers but only one could be used to access Gab.ai. And people who don't like antisemitism knew that and began threatening to boycott that browser and encourage others to do the same. It would be totally reasonable for that browser to remove support for Gab.ai at that point.
If GoDaddy won't handle their domain name, I'm sure some registrar in Russia would glady give them gab.ru
A business doesn't have to keep doing business with a customer, they are free to cut them off.