& # 39; Twitter for the far right & # 39; offline after the Pittsburgh attack

American social media Gab sank out Sunday after one of the users, Robert Bowers, killed eleven people in a synagogue in Pittsburgh. On Gab, he placed his last message for the attack: "Get well with your courtesy, I'm going inside." Bowers had previously placed anti-Semitic rebellions and threats on Gab.

The supplier Godaddy ended the collaboration because Gab would violate the conditions, including "encouraging violence". Previously, Microsoft, payment services such as Paypal and Stripe, and the hosting company Joyent had broken the partnership. Apple and Google refused to place the Gab application in their store last year.

Gab is co-responsible for the attack because the site is home to right-wing opinion makers, neo-Nazis and conspiracy thinkers. Gab sees hate speech as an inseparable part of freedom of expression and does not oppose it.

Gab reacts violently to the expulsion from the Internet via Twitter. According to the tweets, Gab immediately condemned the attack, would not tolerate calls for violence and terror, and himself (after the attack) reported Bowers anti-Semitic messages to the police. According to Gab, there is still much to be done in the area of ​​hate speech on larger sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

Censorship of Silicon Valley

Gab was founded in 2016 by American entrepreneur Andrew Torba in the field of technology, as an alternative to Twitter. The site also looks like Reddit: there is a system that allows users to vote up and down. Torba began by being dissatisfied with the stricter behavior of Facebook and Twitter vis-à-vis far-right users. According to him, it is a form of censorship of the "Silicon Valley elite scum" and the "complete monopoly of the left of the Big Social ". The site expressly welcomes users banned from general social networks. Gab claims to have 800,000 users. According to Reuters, crowdfunding has raised $ 1 million last year and suffered a loss of $ 200,000.

Andrew Torba declares that freedom of expression is his spearhead and that his services are open to all denominations. His public would be composed of "libertarian conservatives, ordinary people of the working class". But according to a study by Princeton and three other universities, the network carries a far right signature. It contains a lot of hatred and racism and "reacts strongly to events related to white nationalism and Donald Trump".

Network of the Far Right

Gab is part of the growing network of sites and services of the far right, based dissatisfaction with large platforms, where people who wish to express their racism, by for example, are increasingly facing restrictions. According to the technical magazine Wired these types of alternatives will never become larger than small echo chambers. Because they do not have a good model of remuneration and that people who wish to assert their political convictions seek an audience as wide as possible in order to come back on the big platforms.

On Twitter, Torba is working on a long speech against "Big Social". Logic, considering his banishment, but aversion also has a personal touch. Torba himself worked in Silicon Valley, where he started as an entrepreneur in Philadelphia advertising company Kuhkoon. He joined the Y Combinator start-up network, but around Trump's election in 2016, he battled Facebook and was fired. According to Y Combinator, he allegedly treated and intimidated people in a racist manner. According to Torba, leftist Silicon Valley is intolerant of conservative Christians and Trump supporters like him.