Wall Street Journal: Gab To Rein In Calls For Violence While Allowing Hate Speech

UPDATE: Yet another account which I never saw promoting violence has been banned.

This is the same Wall Street Journal “journalist” who went after Killstream:

“The social-media site where the alleged Pittsburgh synagogue shooter broadcast his intentions is pledging to curb threats of violence, while it said it plans to remain a platform where hate speech and other forms of extreme content are permitted.

Gab.com, which resumed service this week after a stretch in digital exile, will proactively police the site rather than wait for users to report troubling posts, founder Andrew Torba said in an interview, vowing to bolster efforts to expunge threats of physical harm. …

Since Monday, Gab has permanently banned 200 accounts for repeatedly violating its guidelines around threats of violence, Mr. Torba said. Gab prohibits calling for “acts of violence against others” as well as threatening language that “clearly, directly and incontrovertibly infringes on the safety of another user.” It also removed more than 1,000 posts that threatened violence and hadn’t been reported by users. He said the banned users weren’t notified, but he is working to add more transparency to the process. …”

The big takeaway is confirmation of 200 permanent bans.

Before the Pittsburgh shooting, there were two high profile bans on Gab of Weev and Paul Nehlen. Since Pittsburgh, there have been 200 permanent bans since Monday. Presumably, even more users were permanently banned during the downtime last week because lots of accounts were already noticeably missing when Gab came back online last weekend.

For the record, I have no objection to the “no promotion of violence, but hate speech is fine” standard. That’s the same standard which I have adopted here at Occidental Dissent. I’m not running a free speech website though. This is my own personal nationalist blog. From what I saw on Gab, it isn’t clear that everyone who was purged was even posting violent speech. I could be wrong on this point, but it caught my eye that accounts which I had never considered edge posters were purged.

So, what to do? “Journalists” and Antifa have now signed up accounts on Gab for the sole purpose of reporting posts to nuke accounts. These bans have already had a chilling effect on Gab. They have cancelled out the major advantage that Gab had over Twitter and Facebook which was that users could network and post there without having to deal with those people abusing the moderation system. If we have to deal with them on Gab, why not just deal with them on Facebook and Twitter?

In some form, we’re going to be returning to Facebook and Twitter now. I’m not exactly sure how to do this at the moment. I plan to figure it out over the weekend though.

About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

17 Comments

  1. The ONLY thing Gab has -I mean had- going for it was its promise of free speech. Everything else about it is second rate, a cheap knock-off of Twitter.

    • Freedom of speech is always suppressed with the excuse that it might cause
      trouble. Tyranny is free speech with exceptions.

      “Everything else about it is second rate, a cheap knock-off of Twitter.”

      And so the platform that was created to promote free speech, has become a mockery of free speech. Gab’s real motto: “110% half-assed.”

  2. Hilarious. A jewish refugee organization imports mass amounts of shitskins into Robert Bowers district.

    But you know who’s to blame right?

    Violence speech.

    This trick is as old as the jews themselves. And you all ate it like a Christian child blood infused matzo.

  3. According to modern free speech doctrine, you can say anything you like, but you can’t say anything that could offend someone. There’s a word for a person who can tell you you’re not allowed to have an opinion that offends him. He is your master.

  4. Anti-whites say Hate speech is not speech, it’s violence and should not be protected

    Torba is basically adopting this attitude

    He’s not limiting himself to threats or hints at threats or Fed posting or other questionable stuff

    He’s just coming up with rationalizations why “Nazi” speech he doesn’t like is violence, then banning, retroactively, malicious, without transparency

    The bans are ongoing, they got GoyGibson earlier today and he wasn’t that edgy

  5. Gab was the only social media platform I was ever on. After the downtime, upon logging in, I noticed many of the best folks had been shoah’d. It’s not worth wasting time & effort on Gab under these conditions…what’s the point? People who never posted anything violent but were merely pointing out facts about Jews were banned too. So much for “free speech”.

    • I’m not on Gab anymore. This is how it started with Twitter and it isn’t worth investing the time and effort to build up accounts only to have them nuked on a whim in a bad news cycle.

      • Torba talked big on twitter during the week Gab was down but it was all BS. The moment we got back he started the purge and it has been ongoing all week.

        I cannot even fathom what is going to become of this third rate shitty Indian tech site without the far right. Maybe it was a pump and dump scam all along.

      • Oh well. I might post a comment here from time to time. Have been reading your site for years but never commented before. It was good to chat with all of you on Gab, while it lasted. Keep up the good work, and stay safe.

  6. Speaking of Gab…I don’t know if it’s just me or what, but whenever I try to go to the occdissent page, Gab gives me a 404 error and refuses to load. It’s been happening for at least 4 days now, and I haven’t had the same issue accessing other pages I’ve clicked on. Can’t figure out if it’s a Gab-wide issue or something on my end.

  7. Gab was blackmailed into abandoning or compromising its dedication to free speech. Those 11 dead Jews probably didn’t know it but they gave their lives for the greater good of White Genocide.

  8. I will only repeat what I have said for years – VK is the only reliable Social Media network, because it is Czar Vlad’s terrain.

    He has a long track record for putting The West in it’s place, and proof of it is that in the 4 years I have been on that network, this Tarheel Confederate has not had even the hint of a difficulty, whereas on Facebook, every day was a new adventure in hassles.

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