Feels like Gab just made itself a target of direct investigation. While you may not agree with how Congress acts, thumbing your nose at them directly is a great way to have the focus put solely on you.
I'm personally not a fan of Gab, and their claims on freedom of speech have, in my opinion, been way over blown. Plenty of colloquial evidence of people having been banned/blocked for posting, albeit tasteless, anti-Trump or anti-Christian content.
However, I do agree that Congress does, in general, requests too much from to many. There's a middle ground, somewhere, where Gab could have offered to cooperate, while still maintaining their stance.
Of course, Gab understands that to ignore the request altogether would have left them open to further harassment by the government, and they provided as little information as possible, but still complied with the request.
A subpoena is the risk if you don’t respond to a congressional request. So this is two steps removed from a potential contempt charge.
It’s like asking someone to stop pissing on the church wall instead of calling the police immediately.
If it's so essential to the government to invade the private conversations of a company's user base, they should stand by their claims by using subpoena powers.
I believe they're hoping to avoid legal recourse by "requesting" rather than requiring.
The citizens have gun rights and we have a LOT of guns.
And if you think millions with rifles and handguns can't stop the US government, you've not been paying attention to what happened in Afghanistan.