Fascist social network Gab forced to shut down

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Gab, the far-right social network that the suspect in Saturday’s mass shooting at Pittsburgh synagogue used to share anti-Semitic posts, has gone offline after GoDaddy gave it 24 hours to find a new domain provider. GoDaddy’s decision comes after PayPal, Medium, Stripe, and Joyent banned Gab’s accounts over the weekend.

Riiiiiiiight. So all 800,000 people on the site were fascists? They all deserved to have it ripped away basically because one guy happened to be on there and went on a shooting spree? Imagine if this place got shut down because one maniac happened to have an account here. It's like nuking a city because one guy from that city did something evil.

If you’re not already familiar with Gab, the frog-branded social networking site that briefly faced extinction this week after an infamous neo-Nazi twitter troll named Weev issued a threatening and virulently anti-Semitic post, give it a scan: It won’t take more than a minute to find language calling for the “eradication” of Jews or suggesting that “n-----s must be put back in their place.”

“Jews have cornered the whole Internet,” Weev wrote. “And I think the only way we’ll have any freedom of speech here is if someone teaches them a lesson.”

He went on to reference Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people and injured over 600 more after detonating a truck bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

Asia Registry, Gab’s host up until Tuesday of this week, threatened to give the social network the boot over the post, and Weev, who had amassed a large following on the site, was banned from it, causing outrage among his fans. (Gab has since found a new host, which it refuses to name.) Gab’s mission, according to 27-year-old Chief Operating Officer Utsav Sanduja, is promoting free speech, but some of its user base is now voicing doubts over whether the promise is real.

The conflict over Gab’s credibility as a “free speech” website highlights the struggle companies are experiencing during an era where online voices promoting hate speech and sometimes violence are growing louder...

The 280,000 mostly young, so-called "alt-right" provocateurs currently on Gab represents just a blip against the hundreds of millions of users currently on Twitter, but they are well-versed in the language of trolling, which means that they delight in the prospect of disrupting the best-laid plans of Internet gatekeepers—even those like Sanduja who claim to be sympathetic to their reactionary cause.

It’s fairly easy to see why Weev’s post violated Gab’s policy against threats and terrorism, which states that its users are “prohibited from calling for the acts of violence against others,” but Newsweek found numerous other examples of posts on Gab threatening Jews and other minorities lingering on the site this week, untouched. One of them called for blacks and Jews to be shipped out of the country and was accompanied by the infamous photo of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith being lynched in Marion, Indiana in 1930. Another suggested that n------s "have become uppity and must be put in their place," accompanied with a GIF from a scene in the 2013 film 12 Years a Slave.

On his Gab profile, Bowers had written “jews are the children of satan” in his biography and repeatedly shared anti-Semitic content and other hate speech. Shortly before the shooting, Bowers allegedly wrote “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.” (HIAS, a refugee assistance organization, was founded in 1881 to aid Jews fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe and Russia and expanded in the 2000s to cover non-Jewish refugees).

In an emailed statement, a GoDaddy spokesperson said Gab was told to move after breaking the domain registrar’s rules against violent content:

“We have informed Gab.com that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another registrar, as they have violated our terms of service. In response to complaints received over the weekend, GoDaddy investigated and discovered numerous instances of content on the site that both promotes and encourages violence against people.”

Should we nuke Youtube?

It doesn't matter. You can find such talk on Youtube in abundance. Should we nuke Youtube?

I can't remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you're saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it's not literally illegal to express.

It doesn't matter. You can find such talk on Youtube in abundance. Should we nuke Youtube?

YouTube will not be “Nuked”.

I'm betting otherwise.

Imagine if this place got shut down because one maniac happened to have an account here.

Not sure why shutting that site down is against anyone's rights. People have the right to share what they want, including the providers. If a provider doesn't want to allow the website to keep running it should have the right to stop supporting it, just like the rest of us. Same goes for YouTube, it can choose what it allows.

And for companies trying to make a profit, its the customers who decide. We don't live in a world where private institutions are legally forced to open their services to anyone just because its "fair".