The Danger of Extremist Alt-Tech Platforms
Pushing Trump and his allies away from Twitter is not enough
Last Friday, Twitter made the long overdue decision to yank the megaphone from Trump and permanently suspend his account. Prominent platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube followed suit by taking steps to ban or otherwise restrict Trump and his allies who are explicitly encouraging violence and claiming election fraud.
These actions have been met with cries of censorship from Trump’s supporters, the more extreme of whom are facing the consequences of more rigorous content restrictions themselves (YouTube announced that any channel posting false claims about the election results would receive a strike).
No longer welcome on mainstream platforms, Trump’s supporters are flocking to alternative social media networks where their extremist right-wing views are not only tolerated but embraced. One of these sites—which gained popularity after the conservative social media network Parler was deplatformed by Amazon, Apple and Google on Sunday—is Gab.
Although their ostensibly innocent logo of a cartoon frog may look like it was plucked straight out of a children’s book, Gab is far from a family-friendly website. Andrew Torba founded the far-right social network in 2016 in response to Twitter’s removal of several controversial accounts. Founded on the premise of promoting free speech, the platform has since become a cesspool of threatening rhetoric, attracting white supremacists and neo-Nazis who have been banned for violating the terms and agreements of mainstream platforms.
In the days following the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in 2018, it was found that the attacker responsible regularly used Gab to post antisemitic content. Soon after, digital payment companies and Gab’s old domain registrar, GoDaddy, cut ties with Gab, forcing the site to shut down temporarily.
But in a matter of days, it was back up and running. And in the year that followed, its user base grew at an alarming rate. Now, Torba claimed in a tweet that the platform is gaining over 500,000 users each day.
Shortly after the insurrection, the site erupted with talk of revolution and civil war. Hashtags like #StormTheCapitol began trending, and posts supporting Trump and last Wednesday’s events have continued to saturate the platform.
Texas Congressman Michael Cloud, influential QAnon supporter Joe M. and Attorney Sidney Powell—who participated in attempts to overturn the 2020 election results—all urged their followers to join them on Gab following Parler’s shutdown.
This is incredibly alarming. Rita Katz, a terrorism analyst who studies ISIS social media accounts for a living, wrote in a “Politico” Op-Ed that antisemites on Gab are “starting to look a lot like their Islamist extremist counterparts.” Sites like these, she says, threaten entire societies.
The irony in this similarity is that the people calling for insurrection on Gab are very likely avowed enemies of Shariah Law. Meanwhile, they’re advocating for measures comparable to ISIS’s extremist approach to Islam.
Katz wrote those words in 2018. After last Wednesday’s events, it has become increasingly clear that her warnings were not hyperbolic in the slightest. The fact that prominent politicians are encouraging their followers to join such a site is abhorrent. And the fact that a cesspool of antisemitism and white supremacy is the only place where hundreds of thousands of Americans can comfortably express their views should be a sign to Republican leaders that their efforts to deny the far right’s association with these terrorist groups are futile.
At face value, Gab’s policies seem fair enough. Users are prohibited from calling for acts of violence or using threatening behavior. But a brief dive into the site reveals that the moderators are either asleep at the wheel or in possession of a dangerously generous definition of what constitutes threatening language.
Messages like “kill them all” and “all Jews must die” are commonly posted and reposted. Hours before the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, the attacker posted a message accusing the Hebrews Immigrant Aid Society of bringing in “invaders.” He ended the post with, “Screw your optics, I’m going in.” Apparently, the post was not flagged, as it was not perceived as a threat.
Further, a post made by CEO Andrew Torba about “free speech” in 2019 speaks to the kind of person the platform appeals to:
“Free speech means you can offend, criticize, and make memes about any race, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. Sick and tired of the double standards for ‘acceptable speech’ and ‘protected classes’ on both the left and the right.”
This naive logic ignores the fact that prejudice and bigotry often lead to violence. By creating an environment explicitly designed for disseminating hateful comments and divisive thinking, Torba opened the doors for people to express views that manifest in the real world through violence.
Even if Gab makes an effort to clean up some of its unlawful content, which it may do given the recent surge in more prominent users and media attention, it cannot rid itself of its identity as a platform for hatred. And now, it is a platform with hundreds of thousands more users.
As we saw on Wednesday, its users pose a threat to democracy. If we want to heal our nation, we can’t simply push extremists away from mainstream platforms, close our eyes and hope that they disappear. We must find a way to incorporate these extremist individuals into the public forum in a way that allows us to communicate the impact of their words and hold them accountable.