Hacker News Reader

Comment by jakelazaroff | Hacker News Reader

> Frankly, if you look you can find people equally odious on Twitter as well.

You can, but it's a tiny minority of people on Twitter. When I load this page on Gab, literally every single recommended account is like this. A random sample of Twitter users will be basically the same as a random sample of Internet users and brands; a random sample of Gab users seems to be entirely alt-right, white supremacists and Nazis.

Of course people who tend to get deplatformed will tend to congregate on a platform where they don't. But Gab actively courts this userbase. See for example https://twitter.com/ClenchedFisk/status/1027690034718224384

View on HN

Same thing -- people calling for odious thing Y (whgich, unlike odious thing X doesn't get them kicked out of Twitter) would not care to go to Gab with its tiny number of users. Of course Gab would court those who might actually be interested in joining.

Not to say that Gab isn't a cesspool, and Mr. Torba, when he shows up here, appears to be a rather unpleasant character, but Gab being full of bad people is a function not only of Gab being bad by definition, but also of bigger players' policies as well.

Sure, granted. But who cares? It doesn't make Gab come off any better. Opportunistic bigotry is just as bad as… well, bigotry.

I'm not saying Andrew Torba shouldn't have built Gab; I am lamenting its existence, insofar as I don't want anyone to be a white supremacist. But white supremacists do exist, and as long as they do they'll make spaces for themselves, whether on Gab or 8chan or some dark corner of Twitter. All we can do is push those spaces as far away as possible.

So, if I were to declare myself an Even supremacist and plan to turn all Whites (and the others, when we get to them) into fertilizer that would be fine?

And in any case I just am not sure if pushing undesirables (especially if it is undesirables only of a certain political bent, but not the others) into some dark corner is a good strategy. Both sides end up in even stronger filter bubbles, and banned people get good recruiting tools and feed theior persec ution complexes -- because the "lamestream media" and "libturds" actually are out to get them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com