Gab

Free speech for everyone.

Gab.com is a social network website founded in Austin, Texas in August 2016 by CEO Andrew Torba as a "free speech" alternative to Facebook and Twitter. Apparently, the website was founded in response to Facebook employees suppressing conservative™ articles (according to Torba, though those in the reality-based community might disagree) and the "entirely left-leaning Big Social monopoly" by mainstream social media platforms. Despite its initially innocuous appearance and good intentions such as its "people and free speech first" policy, the website has unsurprisingly (see 8chan, another free speech Internet experiment) become a refuge for cranks, conspiracy theorists, alt-righters, white supremacists, white nationalists, Neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, internet trolls, homophobes/transphobes, Islamophobes, terrorists/extremists, denialists (Holocaust, Obama birther and climate change), and other unsavory creatures of the web. Gab has since become the dumping ground for all things banned from Twitter, and not in a good way. Until 2018, the logo of the website was a frog (which screamed Pepe the Frog, though Torba denies the connection, claiming that it was inspired from Bible verses Exodus 8:1–12 and Psalms 78:45). The website is one of the several outlets that form the alt-tech.

The website has over 835,000 users. However, on the bright side, as of 2019, it only has 19,526 active user accounts. The site lacks a full-text search feature but supports searching by hashtags.

Torba's ultimate goal with Gab is to create a full-fledged right-wing tech ecosystem dedicated to his militant version of "Christianity", which is based on radical white nationalist pique toward non-Christians, QAnon conspiratorial thinking, and outrage at everything "elite".

Dissenter by Gab, aka introducing hate speech on news sites' comments sections
In February 2019, Andrew Torba introduced Dissenter, a new project that claimed to be "the comments section of the internet". It is a browser add-on that allows people to comment on news websites. Not so surprisingly, it has been blocked by Mozilla and Google for attracting the same audience that Gab brings in. Dissenter has been called "the (browser) extension of the far right." Gab also offers a web browser also called "Dissenter" (a fork of Brave Browser) to respond to being blocked by Mozilla and Google. The Windows and Linux versions of the browser (v1.5.114) was last updated March 2020, whereas the macOS version (0.70.122) was last updated on November 2019, meaning the browser is functionally abandonware (or at the very least, concerningly old).

Relaunch
In July 2019, Gab was relaunched after struggling from the fallout of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. The relaunched site was built on the free software Mastodon, but not in affiliation with its developers. The nature of the free AGPL3 license that Mastodon is licensed under prevents its team from doing anything about Gab's fork. Thankfully, Gab's viewership has been plummeting since the updates.

Controversies
Because of its content, Gab.com has been banned from several outlets. Apple banned Gab due to its pornographic content, while Twitter blocked it for its feature that shares posts from the site on Twitter. Unsurprisingly, Google Play also banned the website for violating its hate speech policy. In response, Gab.com sued Google for violating antitrust laws.

On September 5, 2017, Gab.com was forced to censor a post deemed offensive by Instra Corporation in 48 hours. The next day, the company got embroiled in another censorship controversy when domain company AsiaRegistry demanded that Andrew Anglin's offensive post about Heather Heyer's killing at the Unite the Right rally be removed; the company complied by removing his post.

On October 27, 2018, crazed anti-semite Robert Bowers killed 11 people at the Tree of Life, a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The suspect was found to be an active user of Gab, and used the platform as an echo chamber for racist, anti-Semitic and bigoted ideology. Bowers blamed Jews for bringing in Central American migrants into the United States, claiming "HIAS [Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society] likes to bring invaders that kill our people. I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I'm going in," and "Why Hello there HIAS! You like to bring hostile invaders to dwell among us? We appreciate the list of friends you have provided." He believed that there was a white genocide, writing "Daily Reminder: Diversity means chasing down the last white person," featured the neo-Nazi catchphrase 1488 on his profile at least twice (on his account picture and the other in a post titled "Make Ovens 1488 F Again"), and reposted other anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi and Holocaust denial/Holocaust-related content from other users such as Patrick Little and Daily Stormer writer "Grandpa Lampshade". Shortly thereafter, Paypal suspended Gab from their service, and Gab's hosting provider gave them the boot.

The hate flows down from the top
Unsurprisingly, Andrew Torba, Gab's CEO, is antisemitic like much of Gab's userbase is. In October 29 2021, he tweeted a tirade regarding his desire to create a "parallel Christian society" due to being "fed up and done with the one", and supported this with antisemitic comics from StoneToss. On his social feed on Gab, Torbin has even fewer problems whipping out anti-Semitic tropes in his posts, such as "Zionists" being responsible for creating the Federal Reserve (which for some reason is a "subversion of American Christianity"), or "Jews control the media".

In late January 2022, Torba announced that Gab would sponsor as well as give a speech at the America First Political Action Conference, the neo-Nazi alternative political conference to  run by neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. In the announcement, Torba declared that he wanted "unity on the right", then proceeded to trash-talk CPAC for supposedly being "sponsored by Facebook and Google" and Turning Point USA for being "sponsored by atheist libertarian billionaires". This announcement actually was extreme enough to piss off many Gab members.

In the rest of 2022, Torba doubled down on his hardcore Christian nationalist side as well as his antisemitism. In one video, for instance, he stated that he believed that modern right-wing politics in America "is an explicitly Christian movement because this is an explicitly Christian country", and then tied this to his support for transforming America into a Christian theocracy. ("You're not going to be forced to convert or anything like this, but you're going to enjoy…the fruits of living in a Christian society under Christian laws.") Torba's belief that the conservative movement should be 100% Christian meant that even prominent Jewish conservatives such as Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin were verboten. ("They don't share our values. They have inverted values from us as Christians.") On his social media accounts, Torba continued to repost many antisemitic posts from his platform's users, including the white genocide/ conspiracy theory espoused by mass murderer Bowers; praise for Holocaust denial; complaints about supposed ""Jewish influence" in government, business, and the media; and a post stating that "the Jews killed Christ".

All of this culminated in October 2022 when Torba, along with a pastor named Andrew Isker, self-published a book entitled Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide For Taking Dominion And Discipling Nations. In this book, Torba described his vision of building up a parallel "Christian" society that eventually will "fill the vacuum of the secular state when it falls" (exactly why the state will fall, beyond Torba's belief that the "system" is "wicked and corrupt", is not exactly clear). Torba's version of "Christianity" naturally is severely tilted towards culture war topics (including transphobic, homophobic, and anti-abortion rhetoric, not to mention the typical misuse of snarl words such as "Marxist" and "woke"). Other bits of this book focused on "traditional values" concepts such as masculinity and patriarchy, fire and brimstone rhetoric, spiritual warfare, and eventual Dominionism. The religious ideology that Torba tolerates is very narrow; not only is his bête noire religions, such as Judaism, "a false religion", but "if you say you are a Christian and you reject “Christian Nationalism,” you are just a disobedient Christian."

Torba also endorsed several far-right Republican politicians in the 2022 midterm elections that also flirted with Christian nationalism ideology. These endorsements were often extremely controversial (and not welcomed by some, though not all, of the endorsed candidates) thanks to Torba's rabid antisemitism. Unsurprisingly, Torba is against the COVID-19 vaccine, and has used quackery like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to "treat" the bouts of COVID-19 he caught.