The neo-Nazi Twitter clone, Gab, has suspended operations in the wake of the Squirrel Hill massacre. Gab's CEO, Andrew Torba, posted a whiny statement to the site that says Gab is "not going anywhere," which is the tech equivalent to Trump's "confidence" in any given staffer. Without a free-speech platform like Gab, Torba has been frantically shitposting on Twitter and hoping a major media outlet will quote him blowing a dog whistle. Torba has even asked his favorite orange autocrat for a patriotic bailout so he can keep fighting the Silicon Valley liberal elites who are telling the Nazis to shut the hell up.
Shortly after people discovered the Pittsburgh shooter (now charged with
multiple hate crimes) was a Gab user, they began combing through his posts and found he had a long history of anti-Semitic rants. Even though Gab quickly offered some thoughts and prayers, the biggest names in internet infrastructure suddenly announced they were pulling the plug on Gab. You know, because it's full of Nazis.
First PayPal said Gab was
violating its Terms of Service by accepting Nazi gold and "explicitly allowing the perpetuation of hate, violence or discriminatory intolerance." Shortly after PayPal stopped Gab's money train, Gab's webhost, Joyent, said it was suspending the site too. Then, like an angry mob of Heathers, GoDaddy, Stripe, Medium, and Shopify all drew their long knives on Gab.
Torba says Gab quickly suspended the accused murderer's account and sees no problem with trolls screaming anti-Semitic crap on Gab. He tells NPR that Gab has "been smeared by the mainstream media for defending free expression and individual liberty," and that he didn't see "a direct threat" from the accused killer's posts. Like this one, his last:
Yesterday Torba tweeted what appears to be the full audio of his interview with NPR. He calls himself a simple Trump-loving Christian patriot, and in his view, kicking Nazis off Twitter will make them "express" themselves "with violence" instead of pictures of frogs dressed like Hitler. Torba then toots his dogwhistle by accusing Facebook and Twitter of a double-standard in allowing Louis Farrakhan on their platforms. He concluded by calling Gab "the banned book of the internet."
Now, let's be clear: We are NOT saying, "Gab CEO Andrew Torba is a white supremacist." Torba spews a lot of the same rhetoric and buzzwords used by white supremacists, and created an internet hate machine for Milo Yiano-whatever, Alex Jones, Richard Spencer, Andrew Anglin, MRAs, incels, #MAGA idiots, and white supremacists to flock to after they began getting banned from Twitter and Facebook back in August of 2016. It's really just one hell of a coincidence that they all find themselves on Gab saluting white supremacist and Trump rhetoric.
Since finding he was being booted off the internet (again), Torba has been having an epic meltdown on Twitter. He spent last night accusing people of doxxing him and sending him death threats, and calling journalists "the enemy of the people" and a "cancer" on society. He's been posting bitchy replies to a WaPo reporter investigating Gab's ties to white supremacy, and flipped out on a local news crew.
Last night Torba began ranting about being taken out of context, posting stories from Breitbart, Big League Politics, and other blogs that blow smoke up his ass. Tucker Carlson, Fox News's resident white supremacist knight, even gave a whole monologue whitewashing hate speech and re-framing the Pittsburgh shooter's anti-Semitic rants as a "holy war" over gun control and immigration. According to Tucker, this isn't about kicking Nazis off the internet, it's about the thought police and brain rape. Tucker's winking rant about Gab didn't go unnoticed; a grateful Torba posted a screen shot during the segment as Tucker railed against "obedient serfs chirping the party line."
looks like I wasn't the only one to notice Tucker defending gab pic.twitter.com/aKJn4R26DE
— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) October 30, 2018
No, Media Matters guy, you weren't.
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NPR / The Verge / Bloomberg ]
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