Gab becomes the last focus of the battle for hate speech online

October 29, 2018 / 08h14 GMT

By Tim Stelloh

The social media site favored by a Pennsylvanian man accused of shooting eleven people in a synagogue on Saturday became the focus of a battle on online hate speech and the platforms that l? 39; welcome.

The site, Gab, said Sunday that its domain registrar, GoDaddy, was breaking its links – an announcement made a day after the social network announced that two payment service companies, PayPal and Stripe, and its web host, Joyent , were also dumping. he.

"When a site allows the perpetuation of hatred, violence or discriminatory intolerance, we take immediate and decisive action," said PayPal spokesman Justin Higgs in a statement. .

Gab who says that he has 800,000 users, presents himself as a champion of freedom of expression. But it has also been criticized as a haven for the right right and a hotbed of racism, an audience that has attracted an avid audience for extremist content after other mainstream platforms, including Twitter and Reddit, have begun to push back the hate speech of their services.

And while some social media companies have repressed the "worst of Facebook and YouTube," said Jason Kint, CEO of the professional association Digital Content Next, Gab "has welcomed them with open arms."

In an email on Sunday, a spokesman for GoDaddy said the company had given Gab 24 hours to find a new domain provider after finding "numerous" examples of content promoting and encouraging violence on the site. In the meantime, PayPal announced that it was already canceling Gab's account before Saturday's shooting.

Citing confidentiality issues, a spokesman for Stripe declined to comment. Joyent's CEO, Scott Hammond, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In one Twitter post on GoDaddy, Gab seemed to be asking for help from President Donald Trump, saying, "It's madness … I hope you're attentive."

Andrew Torba, CEO of Gab, said that he expected the site to be "down a bit" from Monday morning.

"Gab is not going anywhere," he wrote. "We will come out stronger than ever."

In a study published earlier this year, researchers who viewed 22 million publications on the site for more than a year found that hate speech was "largely present." Of these publications, 5.4% contained hate speech – more than twice as many. found on Twitter, but on the "Politically incorrect" message board of less than 4chan.

In an article published Sunday, Torba mentioned the study: "Gab has not been used on the Internet to express a minority of our users".

The accused shooter, Robert Bowers, used the network to publish conspiracy theories and messages about the "migrant caravan" traveling from Central America to the United States to seek asylum. On Saturday, Bowers threatened the Hbrew Immigrant Aid Society – which has been providing humanitarian assistance to refugees for more than a century – claiming that the group was bringing immigrants to the United States to commit acts of violence. .

"Fuck your optics, I'm going," he wrote.

The decision to oust Gab recalled a decision made last year by Cloudflare, a content company, in which it broke ties with the neo-Nazi Stormer shortly after Unite the Right reunited in Charlottesville.

Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, said the company had long been angry at "those hateful people" – but remained neutral as a network until the Daily Stormer claimed that Cloudflare had quietly endorsed the company. Ideology of the site.

"We could not stay neutral after these statements of secret support," Prince wrote.

Kint said that it was "obvious" that companies do the same with Gab.

"Because we are not talking about ourselves anymore, the decision to withdraw is simple," he said. "The real backbone is not wanting to be associated with Facebook, Instagram and YouTube."

The researchers who studied Gab have described it as somewhere between a social media giant like Twitter and a marginal site like the 4chan forum.

Even though the site remains far less visible than Facebook or Instagram, said one of these researchers, Barry Bradlyn, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Illinois, he must be taken seriously .

"It is very tempting to view online communities such as Gab as isolated marginal communities – outside of the mainstream, so maybe we can just let what happens to stay there and keep it going. ignore, "he said. But "they have a disproportionate influence on Twitter and other mainstream media. It is not because these networks are marginal that they do not influence the daily discourse. "