The Far Right Has a New Digital Safe Space

When the white nationalist leader Richard B. Spencer was suspended from Twitter recently, he hopped over to YouTube to address his supporters. “Digitally speaking,” he said, Twitter had sent “execution squads across the alt-right.” He accused Twitter of “purging people on the basis of their views,” calling it “corporate Stalinism.” Then he mapped out a path forward. “There’s obviously Gab, which is an interesting medium,” he said. “I think that will be the place where we go next.”

Gab is a new social network built like a hybrid of Twitter and Reddit — posts are capped at 300 characters, and the crowd votes to boost or demote posts in the feed. But Gab’s defining feature is its user guidelines, or rather, its lack thereof. Gab bans illegal activities — child pornography, threats of violence, terrorism — and not much else. “Facebook, Twitter and Reddit are taking the path of censorship,” Utsav Sanduja, Gab’s chief communications officer, told me via email. “Gab does not.”

Think of Gab as the Make America Great Again of social sites: It’s a throwback to the freewheeling norms of the old internet, before Twitter started cracking down on harassment and Reddit cleaned out its darkest corners. And since its debut in August, it has emerged as a digital safe space for the far right, where white nationalists, conspiracy-theorist YouTubers, and minivan majority moms can gather without liberal interference.

This election laid bare the ideological divide on social media, and since the election, the rift has deepened. Just as dejected Hillary Clinton supporters have come together in Pantsuit Nation — a “secret” Facebook group of nearly four million members — some on the right have found their postelection online oasis in the invitation-only Gab.

Gab’s 25-year-old founder, Andrew Torba, dreamed up the site after reading reports that Facebook employees suppress conservative articles on the site. Mr. Torba — who previously created Kuhcoon, a system for running automated Facebook ad campaigns (it’s now called Automate Ads) — is a rare conservative Christian tech C.E.O. Gab is a corrective to what he dubs “Big Social,” and it’s based on what the company calls “a pluralistic ethos of mutual respect and toleration of dissonant views.”

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When other social sites push out disruptive users, Gab opens its arms. Recently, Twitter beefed up abuse rules to police not only threats but also hate speech “against a race, religion, gender, or orientation.” (The move presaged the purge that swept up Mr. Spencer.) And Reddit erased a community called #Pizzagate, where conspiracy theorists had gathered to spin lies about Democratic pedophiles operating out of a D.C. pizzeria. On Gab, the topic is always trending.

All the big-name Twitter castaways have resurfaced here: In addition to Mr. Spencer, there is Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart editor who was barred from Twitter for siccing trolls on the “Ghostbusters” actress Leslie Jones; Pax Dickinson, the former Business Insider chief technology officer who rebranded himself as a victim of P.C. culture when he was sacked for posting sexist tweets; and Tila Tequila, the reality TV star who was booted from Twitter after posting racial slurs and pro-Nazi stuff. Gab has also attracted the cutting conservative commentator Ann Coulter; the right-wing media guerrilla Mike Cernovich; and the disinformation king Alex Jones, founder of Infowars. Gab now hosts 98,000 accounts, with tens of thousands more hopeful members on a wait list.

Right-wing rhetoric pervades the site, even the lifestyle and sports categories. With more than 28,000 followers, Mr. Yiannopoulos is one of the site’s biggest stars, though he rarely posts anything. On election night, Mr. Torba excitedly live-Gabbed Donald J. Trump’s victory, then wrote, “Gab is going to be absolutely massive under President Trump.”

The site has a broader conservative coalition than the largely young, mostly male crews camped out on Reddit’s Trump forums or slithering around the anonymous message board 4chan. The Facebook factions have found a home here, too. Recently a woman named Lisa posted to Gab: “Hi folks. I’m a #gabmom from Ohio and this is my 1st post. Still trying to figure the format out but thanks for the site Andrew!” Her note has been up-voted more than 200 times. Gab’s mascot is a frog, which Mr. Torba claims is based on religious and natural sources associating frogs with exodus and rebirth. Many users see it as a wink to Pepe the Frog, the internet cartoon that became a 4chan icon and — after being dressed up online in Nazi insignia — was declared a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League. But plenty of non-meme-fluent Gab users just see it as a cute mascot, “Gabby.”

High on Mr. Trump’s win, Gab users are pretty upbeat. Part of the reason that Gab’s anti-anti-harassment rules work so well, so far, is that most people agree with one another. And one of those points of agreement is that anti-Semitism is tolerable, if not exactly preferred. On Twitter, anti-Semitic and racist trolls prowl around, pouncing on users while dodging the site’s moderators. But on Gab, anti-Jewish rhetoric is slung casually and liberally. One user, angry that his content had just been downvoted, wrote, “Thanks to the #Jew that just stopped by.” Andrew Auernheimer, a white supremacist troll known as weev, kicked off a minor censorship debate when Gab erased his bio, which advocated the rape, torture and murder of Jews. When one user advised weev to be more careful to avoid trouble with the law, another accused him of being Jewish.

While mainstream social networks are promising to crack down on “fake news,” Gab clears the runway for posts like “Satanic PizzaGate Is Going Viral Worldwide (Elites Are Terrified)” to pick up speed. Ricky Vaughn, a pseudonymous white nationalist (he takes his name from Charlie Sheen’s character in “Major League”) also barred from Twitter, posted to Gab that Twitter is effectively dead and should now be used only to pull off “skirmishes” against Twitter denizens. Gab would be a convenient base for recruiting more digital foot soldiers to that cause.

Behind the rah-rah free speech attitude, dissenting opinions on Gab are quashed in their own way. Overtly racist accounts were created by enemies to make Gab look bad, Mr. Torba said in a post. “Without a doubt,” he wrote, “we have fake shill profiles attempting to play into the media narrative.”

But some have worried that the site’s insulation can dampen their message. “Now that Twitter is purging everyone, I think it’s important for Gab to branch out and attract leftists so we’re not just preaching to the choir,” wrote Paul Joseph Watson, editor at large at Infowars.

When I asked why the site leans conservative, Mr. Sanduja denied that Gab had any ideological bent. “We challenge this premise completely — to the contrary, Gab has a number of diverse users globally,” he wrote. (There is a politely argumentative Democrat who goes by the handle @Democrat, for instance.) But he added that right-wing users would be naturally drawn to Gab. “When a group of people are being systematically dehumanized and labeled as the alphabet soup of phobias,” he wrote, “they will look for a place that will allow them to speak freely without censorship and devoid of Social Justice bullying.”

But that’s the trick, isn’t it? You can’t sell a social destination where conservatives are free from liberal pestering and expect the pitch to resonate across the spectrum. Even the idea that harassment rules are oppressive — instead of protective of the vulnerable — is itself a pointed worldview. I suspect that any concern about inclusion will be assuaged by the comfort of chatting with people who think and talk the same way. It’s the next logical step after all the blocking and muting on Twitter and filtering and unfollowing on Facebook split America into two social media realities. Where there once was a bubble, now there’s a wall.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/30/arts/the-far-right-has-a-new-digital-safe-space.html?_r=0