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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

They're not "banished". Stormfront is still on the Internet. Gab will be too, at least for a while. They're just going to have to work with companies that don't mind helping white supremacists.

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I meant banished from the mainstream. If I understand it correctly Gab started in response to Twitter banning hate-speech. I feel like it's more difficult to radicalize out in the open than it is in an echo-chamber. And those places only have power when people are banned from the mainstream.

Obviously, these are companies that offer products and they can tailor them anyway they want. But I'm making this as a broader statement about our culture.

This is the story Gab likes to tell, but is anyone actually considering it critically? Twitter is full of out-and-proud white nationalists. Its AUP restricts violent and harassing hate speech, going out of its way to refine the definition to targeted harassment. Richard Spencer has an active Twitter account. For that matter, so does Gab itself, which until recently was also an out-and-proud white nationalist account. Gab has a blue checkmark!

What seems to have happened with Gab is that its founder got kicked out of YC for harassing batch-mates, got some publicity for that, and decided to use it to capitalize on the "alt-right". Is there any indication anywhere that Torba is doing anything more interesting than trying to sell neo-Nazis a monorail?

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