title: Halston

text: Halston achieved great fame after designing the pillbox hat worn by Jacqueline Kennedy to her husband's presidential inauguration in 1961, and when he moved to designing women's wear, "Newsweek" dubbed him "the premier fashion designer of all America". When hats fell out of fashion, Halston moved on to designing clothing, made possible by Estelle Marsh, a millionaire from Amarillo, Texas. Marsh was his sole financial backer during this critical time of development. He opened his first boutique on Madison Avenue in 1968. The collection that year included a dark jade velvet wedding gown for advertising executive Mary Wells Lawrence. Lawrence was married to the CEO of Braniff International Airways, Harding Lawrence. She would be instrumental in bringing Halston to Braniff in 1976 to design Braniff's hostess, pilot, ticket agent, and ground personnel uniforms.


title: Halston

text: Halston launched his first ready-to-wear line, Halston Limited, in 1969. Halston's design was usually simple, minimalist yet sophisticated, glamorous and comfortable at the same time. Halston liked to use soft, luxurious fabric like silk and chiffon. He later told "Vogue" that he got rid of "...all of the extra details that didn't work—bows that didn't tie, buttons that didn't button, zippers that didn't zip, wrap dresses that didn't wrap. I've always hated things that don't work." Halston changed the fitted silhouette and showed the female body shape by allowing the natural flow of the fabric to create its own shape. Halston said "Pants give women the freedom to move around they've never had before. They don't have to worry about getting into low furniture or low sportscars. Pants will be with us for many years to come—probably forever if you can make that statement in fashion."


title: Halston

text: Halston's boutique drew celebrity clients like Greta Garbo, Babe Paley, Anjelica Huston, Gene Tierney, Lauren Bacall, Margaux Hemingway, Elizabeth Taylor, Bianca Jagger and Liza Minnelli (both Jagger and Minnelli would become close friends). From 1968 to 1973, his line earned an estimated $30 million.


title: Halston

text: In 1970, Hope Portocarrero, first lady of Nicaragua and client, issued a postage stamp dedicated to Halston.<ref name="NICARAGUA / FAMOSOS COUTURIERS DEL MUNDO // Haslton - Nueva York /"></ref>


title: Halston

text: In 1973, Halston sold his line to Norton Simon, Inc. for $16 million but remained its principal designer. This afforded him creative control with near unlimited financial backing. In 1975, Max Factor released Halston's first namesake fragrance for women. By 1977, sales from the perfume had generated $85 million. Throughout the 1970s, Halston had expanded his line to include menswear, luggage, handbags, lingerie and bedding. "Vogue" later noted that Halston was responsible for popularizing caftans, which he made for Jacqueline Kennedy; matte jersey halter top dresses; and polyurethane in American fashion.


title: Halston

text: As Halston's popularity and fame grew, those he worked with also became well known. His favored models included Pat Cleveland, Anjelica Huston, Heidi Goldberg, Karen Bjornson, Beverly Johnson, Nancy North, Chris Royer, Alva Chinn, Connie Cook, and Pat Ast. This entourage of models were eventually dubbed “The Halstonettes” by fashion journalist André Leon Talley. The Halstonettes appeared together in editorials and ads for Halston clothing and cosmetics and appeared at many Halston-related events. The troupe often travelled with Halston, attended his galas, acted as his muses, and reflected ethnic diversity (Halston was one of the first major designers to hire models of different races to walk in his shows and appear in his ads).


title: Halston

text: Halston was very influential in the design of uniforms. In 1977 he was contracted by Braniff International Airways to create a new look for their flight attendants. He created muted brown uniforms with a distinctive "H" logo. Halston created interchangeable separates in shades of bone, tan and taupe which the airline extended to the seat covers, using brown Argentine leather. The entire scheme was dubbed "Ultra Touch" by the airline in reference to Halston's ultrasuede designs, and was extremely evocative of the late 1970s. An elaborate party was thrown in February 1977, dubbed Three Nights in Acapulco, to introduce the new Halston fashions along with the new and elegant Braniff International Airways.


title: Halston

text: Braniff chairman Harding Lawrence, his wife Mary Wells Lawrence, First Lady Lady Bird Johnson, and Halston himself along with his Halstonettes were in attendance for the grand presentation. Halston and his entourage would arrive at selected points during the party in outfits that matched the deep tones of Braniff Airways' new color schemes that would be applied to their aircraft as part of the new so-called Elegance Campaign. The party and the Halston creations were a hit not only with the fashion press but also with Braniff employees, who thought they were the easiest and most comfortable uniforms they had ever worn.


title: Halston

text: He was asked by the U.S. Olympic Committee to design the Pan American Games and U.S. Olympic Team's uniforms in 1976. He also designed the uniforms for the Girl Scouts, the New York Police Department, and the Avis Rent a Car System.


title: Halston

text: In 1983, Halston signed a six-year licensing deal worth a reported $1 billion with retail chain J. C. Penney. The line, called Halston III, consisted of affordable clothing, accessories, cosmetics and perfumes ranging from $24 to $200. At the time, the move was considered controversial, as no other high-end designer had ever licensed their designs to a mid-priced chain retail store. While Halston was excited about the deal and felt that it would only expand his brand, the deal damaged his image with high-end fashion retailers who felt that his name had been "cheapened". Bergdorf Goodman at the time dropped his Halston Limited line from their store shortly after plans for Halston III were announced.


title: Halston

text: In 1983, Halston Limited, which was owned by Norton Simon, Inc., was acquired by Esmark Inc. After the acquisition, Halston began to lose control over his namesake company and grew frustrated. As the label changed hands (it would be owned by Playtex International, Beatrice Foods and four other companies), Halston continued to lose control and, by 1984, was banned from creating designs for Halston Enterprises. He attempted to buy back his company through protracted negotiations. Halston Enterprises was eventually acquired by Revlon in 1986. Halston was paid a salary by Revlon but had stopped designing clothing for the company. He continued designing for family and friends, most notably Liza Minnelli and Martha Graham. In 1986, Halston designed the costumes for the Martha Graham Dance Company's "Temptations of the Moon". After his contract with Revlon expired, he was in talks to sign a new contract with the company but stopped negotiations after he learned that Revlon planned to continue the line without his input. The line continued on with various designers until 1990, when Revlon discontinued the clothing portion of the line but continued selling Halston perfumes.


title: Halston

text: Halston's on-again off-again lover was Venezuelan-born artist Victor Hugo. The two met while Hugo was working as a makeup artist in 1972. The two began a relationship and Hugo lived on and off in Halston's home. Halston soon hired Hugo to work as his window dresser. Their on-and-off relationship lasted a little over ten years.


title: Halston

text: According to "The New York Times", Halston was known to have had an affair with fashion designer Luis Estevez.


title: Halston

text: In 1988, Halston tested positive for HIV. After his health began to fail, he moved to San Francisco, where he was cared for by his family. On March 26, 1990, he died of Kaposi's sarcoma, an AIDS-defining illness, at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. His remains were cremated.


title: Halston

text: In June 1990, Halston's longtime friend the singer and actress Liza Minnelli sponsored a tribute at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall that was followed by a reception hosted by his friend Elsa Peretti.


title: Halston

text: From November 2014 to January 2015, a traveling exhibition entitled "Halston and Warhol Silver and Suede" was sponsored by the Warhol Museum and co-curated by Halston's niece Lesley Frowick.


title: Halston

text: From February to April 2015, an exhibition was held in the museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City to celebrate Halston's 1970s fashions.


title: Halston

text: In March 2017, "Halston Style", a retrospective of his career, opened at the Nassau County Museum. The retrospective was curated by Halston's niece Lesley Frowick and features material derived from his personal archives that he gave to her before his death. Frowick also authored the accompanying catalogue, "Halston: Inventing American Fashion".


title: Halston

text: In May 2019, the documentary "Halston", directed by Frédéric Tcheng was released. The documentary revived interest in Halston and The Halstonettes. In May 2019, " The New York Times" released an article, "Halston’s Women Have Their Say" which outlined many of the Halstonette women reflecting on their experience. A similar article was published in August 2019, by CNN titled, "Free Inside Our Clothes: Top Models Remember What It Was Like to Walk a Halston Show".


title: Halston

text: According to fashion critic Robin Givhan, when Tom Ford relaunched Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent in the late 1990s, he found his inspiration in the glittering glamour of Halston's style: "When Ford added Yves Saint Laurent to his workload in 1999, he did due diligence in researching the house's history. But his work continued to display a louche attitude that recalled the best of Halston."


title: Halston

text: Ewan McGregor portrayed the designer in the television miniseries "Halston", which premiered May 14, 2021 on Netflix, adapted from the 1991 biography "Simply Halston" by Steven Gaines.


title: Halston

text: After Revlon ceased production of the clothing portion of the company in 1990, it was purchased by Borghese in 1991. In 1996, sportswear firm Tropic Tex bought the Halston clothing license (Revlon still retains the rights to Halston fragrances) and hired designer Randolph Duke to relaunch the line. Duke's first collection debuted in fall 1997 to critical acclaim. Mariah Carey, Celine Dion and Minnie Driver (who wore a crimson Halston dress to the 70th Academy Awards ceremony) were among the celebrities to wear the new Halston creations. By 1998, Duke left the company after it was sold to Catterton-Simon, a private equity fund. Later that year, designer Kevan Hall was hired as head designer for the label then called House of Halston. Hall's first collection for the label debuted in Spring 1998 to critical acclaim. In 1999, Catterton-Simon sold Halston Enterprises to Neema Clothing. Head designer Kevan Hall left the House of Halston in 2000.


title: Halston

text: After Hall's departure, Halston's new owner, James J. Ammeen, planned to relaunch the Halston line as a luxury brand and hired designer Bradley Bayou. Bayou's line, Bradley Bayou for Halston, was worn by Oprah Winfrey and Queen Latifah. Bayou left Halston in frustration in 2005 after Ammeen refused to give Bayou more money for advertising.


title: Halston

text: In 2006, Jimmy Choo co-founder Tamara Mellon, stylist Rachel Zoe, and film producer Harvey Weinstein partnered with Hilco Consumer Capital to purchase the line in another effort to relaunch it. Problems about the line's new direction quickly arose when Tamara Mellon and Rachel Zoe could not agree on a designer. Former Versace designer Marco Zanini was eventually hired in July 2007.


title: Halston

text: From 2007 to 2008, Halston under the Tamara Mellon administration approached and voted in Chris Royer as the Halston Archivist and a member of their advisory board. She developed the Hilco/Halston Archive of over 300 Halston vintage unique pieces, which included editorial articles and all background information in reference to Halston design. In 2008, Chris Royer curated the “Neiman Marcus Halston Glam" exhibition in San Francisco utilizing the Halston/Hilco archives. And certain pieces were loaned again in 2014 for the "Halston and Warhol: Silver and Suede" traveling exhibition.


title: Halston

text: Zanini's Halston collection debuted in February 2008 to mixed reviews. Zanini left Halston in July 2008 and a British designer, Marios Schwab, was hired in May 2009. Halston Enterprises then decided to launch a second line called Halston Heritage. The Heritage line is based on archived sketches by Halston with modern updates. In 2009, actress Sarah Jessica Parker wore two Halston Heritage dresses in the film "Sex and the City 2" and the company hired her as the president and chief creative officer for the mainline. She also oversaw the Halston Heritage line.


title: Halston

text: In February 2011, Marios Schwab released his first Halston collection for the autumn/winter season. During her tenure as creative director, Sarah Jessica Parker chose jeweler Jacqueline Rabun to design a selection of silver accessories.


title: Halston

text: Nevertheless, Schwab's collection debuted to negative critical reception. In the August 2011 issue of American "Vogue", Sarah Jessica Parker revealed that she had left the company. Schwab and Harvey Weinstein left the company shortly thereafter.


title: Halston

text: In late 2011, Hilco Consumer Capital consolidated ownership and brought in Ben Malka, former president of BCBG, to continue the Halston Heritage business as chairman and CEO. Malka enlisted the help of Marie Mazelis, the former creative director of Max Azria and Hervé Léger, to spearhead the re-launch of the contemporary line. Hilco decided to focus exclusively on the Halston Heritage ready-to-wear activity and invested an additional $7.5 million for its development.


title: Halston

text: In September 2012, the company moved its headquarters from New York to Los Angeles. In February 2013, Halston Heritage signed a deal with the Majid Al Futtaim Group for distribution of its products in the United Arab Emirates. In 2015, the company sold H by Halston and H Halston to the company Xcel that specializes in bringing fairly known brands to mass market outlets.


title: Gab (social network)

text: Gab is an American alt-tech microblogging and social networking service known for its far-right userbase. Widely described as a haven for neo-Nazis, racists, white supremacists, white nationalists, antisemites, the alt-right, supporters of Donald Trump, conservatives, right-libertarians, and believers in conspiracy theories such as QAnon, Gab has attracted users and groups who have been banned from other social media platforms and users seeking alternatives to mainstream social media platforms. Founded in 2016 and launched publicly in May 2017, Gab claims to promote free speech, individual liberty, the "free flow of information online", and Christian values. Researchers and journalists have characterized these assertions as an obfuscation of its extremist ecosystem. Antisemitism is prominent in the site's content and the company itself has engaged in antisemitic commentary. Gab CEO Andrew Torba has promoted the white genocide conspiracy theory. Gab is based in Pennsylvania.


title: Gab (social network)

text: Researchers note that Gab has been "repeatedly linked to radicalization leading to real-world violent events". The site received extensive public scrutiny following the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in October 2018. The perpetrator of the attack, Robert Gregory Bowers, had a history of making extreme, antisemitic postings on the platform, as well as messages indicating an immediate intent to cause harm before the shooting. After the shooting, Gab briefly went offline when it was dropped by its hosting provider and denied service by several payment processors. In 2021, Gab was among the platforms used to plan the United States Capitol attack on January 6.


title: Gab (social network)

text: Gab's functionality is similar to that of Twitter. Users of Gab can publish posts, initiate private chats, join groups, livestream and buy products. The company also maintains an email service, text messaging service, news aggregation website, advertising platform, web browser, and browser extension to allow commenting on third-party websites. In July 2019, Gab switched its software infrastructure to a Mastodon fork, a free and open-source social network platform. Mastodon released a statement in protest, denouncing Gab as trying to "monetize and platform racist content while hiding behind the banner of free speech".


title: Gab (social network)

text: Gab was founded in 2016 by chief executive officer (CEO) Andrew Torba and chief technology officer (CTO) Ekrem Büyükkaya, who had previously worked together at advertising technology company Automate Ads (formerly Kuhcoon). Torba started working on the site in May 2016 and on August 15, 2016, Gab launched in private beta, billing itself as a "free speech" alternative to social networking sites Twitter and Facebook. Torba has cited "the entirely left-leaning Big Social monopoly", "social justice bullying", "the rise of online censorship during the 2016 election." and an alleged bias against conservative articles by Facebook as his reasons for creating Gab. Gab AI, Inc. was incorporated on September 9, 2016. Utsav Sanduja later joined Gab as chief operating officer (COO).


title: Gab (social network)

text: Torba said in November 2016 that the site's user base had expanded significantly following censorship controversies involving major social media companies, including the permanent suspensions of several prominent alt-right accounts from Twitter after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. During November 2016, Gab gained 5,000 new users per week. By mid-December 2016, there were 200,000 people on Gab's waiting list. At the time, Torba claimed that Gab had about 130,000 registered users.


title: Gab (social network)

text: During August and September 2017, immediately following the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Gab experienced another increase in new users, gaining around 3,300 per week.


title: Gab (social network)

text: In early September 2017, Gab faced pressure from its domain registrar Asia Registry to take down a post by "The Daily Stormer" founder Andrew Anglin, giving Gab 48 hours to do so. Gab later removed the post. Danny O'Brien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation commented that this pressure was part of an increase in politically motivated domain name seizures.


title: Gab (social network)

text: On August 9, 2018, Torba announced that Microsoft Azure, Gab's host, had threatened to suspend the site for "weeks/months" if they failed to remove two antisemitic posts made by Patrick Little, a U.S. Senate candidate who had been ejected from the Republican Party for his antisemitism. According to "The Verge", the posts "express intense anti-Semitism and meet any reasonable definition of hate speech". Little said in the posts that Jews should be raised as "livestock" and that he intended to destroy a "holohoax memorial". In response to Azure's threat, Little posted on Gab that "I'll delete the posts, but this is a violation of our rights as Americans". Gab's Twitter account also asserted that Little had self-deleted the posts, but this was contradicted by Torba who said Gab itself had deleted the posts which "unquestionably" broke their "user guidelines". On the same day, Alex Jones interviewed Torba on "The Alex Jones Show" during his coverage of his own permanent ban from YouTube. Little was suspended indefinitely from Gab in late November 2018 for encouraging harassment of private individuals; Gab claimed that although Little's account had posted hate speech, it was not the cause of the ban.


title: Gab (social network)

text: According to Gab's filings with the SEC, around 635,000 users were registered on Gab by September 10, 2018. On September 12, 2018, Gab purchased the Gab.com domain name from Sedo for $220,000 on Flippa, an online business marketplace; it had previously been using the domain Gab.ai.


title: Gab (social network)

text: During the 2018 Brazilian presidential election from September to October 2018, many right-wing Brazilian political pages were banned from Facebook for breaching the site's hate speech rules. In response, many administrators of these pages began promoting Gab as an alternative platform; subsequently, Brazilians became the second-largest demographic of Gab users. Jair Bolsonaro's party, the Social Liberal Party, has an official Gab account.


title: Gab (social network)

text: In December 2018, Gab sponsored Turning Point USA's 2018 "Student Action Summit" in Palm Beach, Florida. Days before the event, Turning Point USA removed Gab from the list of sponsors without explanation. Gab later posted a press release protesting the unexplained removal.


title: Gab (social network)

text: Robert Gregory Bowers, the suspected shooter in the attack against a Pittsburgh synagogue on October 27, 2018, maintained an active, verified Gab account where he displayed the neo-Nazi code-phrase "1488" and a bio that said, "jews are the children of satan". Just prior to the shooting, he used this account to post "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".


title: Gab (social network)

text: After Bowers was arrested, Gab suspended his profile, gathered all user data for the account, and contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). On October 27, 2018, the day of the shooting, PayPal, GoDaddy, and Medium terminated their relationship with Gab, and PayPal released a statement that it had it done so based on its review of accounts that may engage in the "perpetuation of hate, violence or discriminatory intolerance". Later on the same day, Gab announced on Twitter that Joyent, Gab's hosting provider, would terminate their service on October 29 at 9:00 am ET. The tweet said that the site expected to be down for weeks. Stripe and Backblaze also terminated their services with Gab after the shooting. On October 29, Gab claimed in a tweet that they "took the site down early on purpose last night because we knew the media would take the bait and have stories on it for this morning".


title: Gab (social network)

text: Following the shooting, Gab received substantial media attention, having been relatively unknown by the general public prior to the attack. "The New Republic" noted that prior to the shooting "Despite some attention in the mainstream tech press, Gab was essentially considered a sideshow, an also-ran in the social media wars, destined to fade away like Yo, Ello, or other mostly forgotten platforms that could never hope to compete with Silicon Valley monopolies".


title: Gab (social network)

text: Gab had defended itself from criticism as a result of the shooting, saying that they: "refuse to be defined by the media's narratives about Gab and our community. Gab's mission is very simple: to defend free expression and individual liberty online for all people. Social media often brings out the best and the worst of humanity". Torba called the shooting "a clear act of terror", adding that he "fundamentally believed in freedom of expression", but did not tolerate threats of violence. Torba also said that "I do think that more speech is always going to be the answer to combat bad speech or hate speech".


title: Gab (social network)

text: Ekrem Büyükkaya, Gab's co-founder and CTO, announced his resignation on October 28, citing "attacks from the American press" that "have taken a toll on me personally".


title: Gab (social network)

text: After the site was taken down, Gab's homepage was changed to a message saying it was down due to being "under attack" and being "systematically no-platformed", adding that Gab would be inaccessible for a "period of time". Also after the site was taken down, Torba accused the media of demonizing Gab while ignoring similar problems on mainstream social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter.


title: Gab (social network)

text: Gab returned online on November 4, 2018, after Epik agreed to register the domain. Rob Monster, the CEO of Epik, had defended Gab's neo-Nazi users and also baselessly claimed that neo-Nazis on Gab are "liberal trolls" looking to "give enemies of freedom an excuse". On Gab, Christopher Cantwell replied to Monster's claims, stating: "We're not liberals, nor are the people trying to get us censored. The people trying to censor Gab are (((communists))), and the Nazis are the only ones willing to take them on... Eventually, everyone will have to pick a side". Monster also said of Gab that "I do believe the guys that are on the site are vigilant".


title: Gab (social network)

text: After Gab returned online, the site was immediately flooded with antisemitic posts and comments, including one comment in response to a post from Torba welcoming back users of Gab and asking users to be nice to each other that said "Fuck that, name the Jews who are trying to shut us down". The comment was later deleted. In response to these posts and comments, Torba claimed that "a lot of people are creating brand new accounts and breaking our guidelines on purpose tonight". Torba also called on users of Gab to help police the site for posts that break Gab's user guidelines, including threats of violence.


title: Gab (social network)

text: Gab turned to cryptocurrency payment processing services after being rejected from PayPal and Stripe in the aftermath of the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. In January 2019, Coinbase and Square, Inc.'s Cash App closed the accounts held by Gab and Andrew Torba. On January 22, 2019, Gab announced that it had partnered with Second Amendment Processing (SAP), a Michigan-based payment processor. Gab removed SAP's credit card payment functionalities in March 2019, only accepting payment via cryptocurrency or check. The same month, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) published an investigation that found that SAP's founder had been convicted of financial crimes in 2007. Gab has not said why it removed the payment processor.


title: Gab (social network)

text: On January 24, 2019, the SPLC reported that Gab had been misrepresenting its services and bloating its user count in its filings and promotional materials. The GabTV service advertised on its StartEngine crowdfunding page was only active very briefly in early 2018, and also , the dedicated page for the service was blank. Unlike other social media companies, Gab did not publish the count of its active users in 2018 and only reported registered accounts. Social media intelligence company Storyful found 19,526 unique usernames had posted content during a seven-day period between January 9 and 16, 2019, far lower than Gab's claimed 850,000 registered users. Users of the site commonly mocked Torba for the site's emptiness, with some accusing him of inflating user numbers. In a December 2018 filing, the company reported that 5,000 users were paying for its subscription services.


title: Gab (social network)

text: Shortly after the SPLC published its January report on Gab's misleading statements and financial struggles, the site made its Twitter account private until January 30, 2019, and switched to an invitation-only mode for new user registrations on January 30. Gab stated that switching to an invitation-only mode was an experiment to improve user experience. Gab previously had intermittent service outages for a week. Gab said that the outages were caused by bot attacks and blamed state actors along with paid "activist bloggers". Torba shared a post from another user that suggested that the "deep state" was responsible. "The Daily Beast" opined that this was an attempt to further obfuscate its numbers in response to reports that it had inflated its user count.


title: Gab (social network)

text: , Gab paid Sibyl Systems Ltd. $1,175 a month for web hosting. On February 14, 2019, the SPLC reported that a software engineer for Sibyl Systems had rejected Gab's claim of having more than 835,000 users and estimated the count to be in the range of a few thousands to a few tens of thousands. Sibyl Systems called the report "categorically false", saying that the "employee claimed to leak information that she could not have had access to" and that the employee had been dismissed.


title: Gab (social network)

text: On July 4, Gab switched its software infrastructure to run on a forked version of Mastodon, a free and open-source decentralized social network platform. The change attempted to circumvent the rejection of Gab's mobile app from the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store, as Gab users gained access to the social network through third-party Mastodon apps that did not subsequently block Gab. Mastodon released a statement the same day denouncing Gab as "seek[ing] to monetize and platform racist content while hiding behind the banner of free speech" and "attempt[ing] to hijack our infrastructure", and said that they had "already taken steps to isolate Gab and keep hate speech off the fediverse". Mastodon stated that most Mastodon instances had blocked Gab's domains, preventing interactions between these instances and Gab, and that Tusky and Toot!, two popular Mastodon mobile apps, had already blacklisted Gab's domains and banned Gab users from using their app. Mastodon also stated that by paywalling features that are otherwise freely accessible in other instances, Gab "offer[s] users no incentive to choose their platform" and "puts itself at a disadvantage compared to any Mastodon instance".


title: Gab (social network)

text: According to SimilarWeb, Gab's website traffic grew almost 200% between January and July 2019, and unique visitors to the site increased 180%. In August 2019, "Vice News" reported that traffic to Gab's website and the rate of new users joining Gab had both significantly increased during the first half of 2019. Also in August 2019, Torba claimed that Gab had over 1 million registered users.


title: Gab (social network)

text: In October 2019, Gab launched Gab Trends, a news aggregate website described by KNTV as being similar to the Drudge Report. Gab Trends provides titles and short summaries of news articles and includes a comment section under each article.


title: Gab (social network)

text: In early 2020, Gab launched Gab Chat in beta, an encrypted text messaging service described by "Mashable" as an alternative to Discord. In late June 2020, hackers leaked a May 26 law enforcement bulletin that was distributed by Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), a whistleblower site that publishes leaked documents. The bulletin was created by the Central Florida Intelligence Exchange Fusion Center, who speculated that Gab Chat's encryption and privacy features for private chatting, such as the service automatically deleting text messages after 30 days of them being sent, could entice white supremacists to use the platform instead of Discord, a platform on which white supremacist groups have been frequently infiltrated by anti-fascists. When reached for a comment by "Mashable", Torba responded to the bulletin in an email saying "Encryption does not render law enforcement totally blind" and that "Encryption doesn't cause a user to simply disappear. It doesn't prevent a service provider from seeing who is using its service or when that person is using the service". Torba also deflected from the concern of white supremacists using Gab Chat, saying that law enforcement should instead focus on stopping child exploitation on mainstream text messaging services.


title: Gab (social network)

text: In April 2020, Gab claimed that it had over 1.1 million registered users and that their website was receiving 3.7 million monthly visitors globally.


title: Gab (social network)

text: In July 2020, "Slate" reported that after Gab was connected to the 2018 Pittsburgh shooting, "Gab never quite recovered". The service's popularity diminished following the attack and the site's subsequent downtime.


title: Gab (social network)

text: In September 2020, Torba wrote that "Gab isn't just building an alternative social network", "We're building an alternative internet".


title: Gab (social network)

text: On October 1, 2020, Reuters broke a story that people associated with the Russian Internet Research Agency, a group known for their interference in the 2016 presidential election, had been operating social media accounts on both mainstream and alt-tech platforms. One of the accounts, which was identified in an FBI probe as a "key asset in an alleged Russian disinformation campaign", had been spreading "familiar—and completely false" information including claims that mail-in voting is prone to fraud, that then-U.S. President Donald Trump was infected with COVID-19 by leftist activists, and that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is a "sexual predator". "Axios" noted that the account had not found much of an audience on mainstream platforms but had caught on among the alt-tech platforms; the Twitter account had fewer than 200 followers, but the Gab account had 3,000 and the Parler account had 14,000. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all took actions to suspend the accounts from their platforms. "The Washington Post" reported on October 7 that Gab had declined to terminate the account after being informed of its connections to the disinformation organization. Torba said to Reuters: "It looks like a blog sharing news stories and opinions. It's irrelevant to us who runs it or why". Speaking to "The Washington Post", Torba said: "They can speak freely on Gab just like anyone else".


title: Gab (social network)

text: During the 2020 U.S. presidential election in November, Gab claimed that they experienced record user growth.


title: Gab (social network)

text: In December 2020, "Engineering & Technology" reported that Gab and other similar platforms could face "huge fines" for spreading misinformation under a new online safety bill in the United Kingdom that was planning on being introduced in 2021.


title: Gab (social network)

text: Although early claims were made that Gab was among the platforms used to plan the storming of the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, a later investigation by the FBI said it "found scant evidence that the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result", and that "ninety to ninety-five percent of these are one-off cases".


title: Gab (social network)

text: Posts about which streets to take in order to run from police, which tools to use to pry open doors, and carrying guns into the halls of Congress, were exchanged on Gab in advance of the storming. During the storming, users of Gab recorded entering offices of members of Congress, including the office of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Users of Gab also posted about searching for then-Vice President Mike Pence. Following the storming and then-President Trump's subsequent permanent suspension from Twitter, Torba said that Gab had experienced a 40% increase in traffic and that Gab was also gaining 10,000 new users per hour as of January 9. After Parler, another alt-tech social network, was pulled offline by its host Amazon Web Services on January 11, former users of that site started migrating to Gab. On January 14, Gab claimed on Twitter that the platform had gained 2.3million new users in the past week. Gab's website experienced an 800% increase in traffic, which forced Torba to order emergency servers to handle the increase in traffic.


title: Gab (social network)

text: On January 12, "ABC News" reported that experts said that conservative-leaning social networks, including Gab, helped create echo chambers for extremist and violent views, which contributed to the Capitol storming.


title: Gab (social network)

text: After the Capitol storming, on January 13, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in an open letter to the United States Department of Justice called for a federal investigation into Gab and Torba to determine if they "intentionally aided" the individuals who were involved in the storming. The ADL cited posts from Torba telling users of Gab "heading to DC" to record "video footage in landscape mode" in anticipation of "communist violence" and also posted on Gab that it "would be a real shame if the people outside stormed the Senate".


title: Gab (social network)

text: In response, Torba denied he and his platform were responsible for the storming, saying that Gab did a "phenomenal job" of mitigating violent content. He also stated that Gab had been removing offending posts and reporting them to federal law enforcement leading up to the storming, saying that "Public safety is our top priority", but declined to say which law enforcement agency they were working with, citing an "ongoing investigation". Torba also deflected attention away from Gab and towards Facebook, saying that the storming was "organized using Facebook's technology, not Gab's". Torba signed off on his response to the ADL by saying that "We will never bend to their demands and we will never censor legal, 1A-protected speech that hurts the ADL's feelings. Ever" and that "Jesus is King."


title: Gab (social network)

text: ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in response: "It's ironic that, when called out for enabling extremist rhetoric, Gab's response is to craft" a letter "containing thinly veiled antisemitism", adding that "As our open letter makes clear, Gab is not moderating this extremist content, and their CEO seems to be encouraging users to upload it".


title: Gab (social network)

text: On January 19, Rachel E. Greenspan from "Business Insider" observed that Gab had tweeted a direct quote from a post by Q, the anonymous individual or group whose messages form the basis of the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory. The tweet was later deleted. She also noted that Gab's Twitter account had posted multiple tweets referencing Jesus, including one tweet posted on January 18 featuring an image of Jesus walking with Pepe the Frog, a cartoon character used by the alt-right.


title: Gab (social network)

text: On February 9, Matt Field from the "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" reported that RT, a media outlet owned by the Russian government that Field claims helped Trump win the 2016 presidential election, had created an account on Gab right before the start of Trump's second impeachment trial. Field noted that RT had posted several articles on their Gab account, including one article criticizing The Lincoln Project, an organization run by anti-Trump Republicans.


title: Gab (social network)

text: On August 27, the U.S. House of Representatives select committee investigating the storming of the Capitol demanded records from Gab (alongside 14 other social media companies) going back to the spring of 2020. On September 1, Torba responded by refusing to cooperate with the investigation, saying that Gab does not track misinformation or disinformation, has no retention policies, keeps no records of internal discussion about concerns of an insurrection, and has no way of knowing that an account is run by a foreign government. Torba and Gab also refused to hand over private user communications to the select committee (communications that Gab has already shared with law enforcement), arguing that the U.S. Congress would need a subpoena or warrant under the Stored Communications Act (SCA). Also in September 2021, Whitney Kimball of "Gizmodo" noted that Gab "might not even agree that an insurrection happened at all". noting an email from the company titled "New Video From Jan 6th Destroys 'Insurrection' Hoax".


title: Gab (social network)

text: In late September, the Federal Office of Justice in Bonn, Germany imposed a fine of €30,000 on Gab for not naming a contact person for questions about the deletion of criminal content, despite a provision from the Network Enforcement Act. Gab has objected to the fine. In a blog post, Torba accused the German authorities of having no intention of removing criminal content and did not mention that the fine was imposed for not naming a contact person. Torba also asked for financial support to combat the fine.


title: Gab (social network)

text: Also in late September, Torba announced that the Gab website's online infrastructure would be upgraded to "preserve a parallel Christian society on the internet for generations to come". On September 22, Torba wrote that "Our vision for Gabvertising and the parallel economy we are building is to empower families and freedom-loving business owners to free themselves from the slavery of Woke Capital" and that "The natural evolution of free speech is free markets, and that's what is forming right now on Gab. An actual free market, not one rigged by a handful globalist big bankers and hedge funds".


title: Gab (social network)

text: On the evening of February 19, Gab's website briefly went offline, originally without explanation. In response, several Twitter users posted images showing Gab accounts run by right-wing media outlets, such as "The Gateway Pundit" and "National File", asking people to donate funds to a suspicious URL. After the site was restored, Torba responded in a blog post saying that Gab themselves had taken the site offline at around 6:25 pm EST, sixteen minutes after they "became aware of several accounts that were posting bitcoin wallet spam and related content". According to Torba, fewer than 20 accounts were affected, Gab "have no indication that any sensitive account information was breached or accessed by any unauthorized users", and that "Because of our quick action zero bitcoin was sent". Torba did not specify which accounts were affected. Torba also said that Gab had "identified and patched a security vulnerability in our codebase" and that "Our engineering team is conducting a full audit of our logs and infrastructure".


title: Gab (social network)

text: On February 26, around a week after Gab briefly went offline, the company published a blog post denying a data breach had taken place. In the post, they wrote that they had been contacted by unnamed reporters who asked about a data breach that may have exposed an archive of posts, direct messages, profiles, and hashed passwords on Gab. Torba wrote in the blog post that there was no independent confirmation that a breach had taken place, and that Gab collects "very little from our users in terms of personal information". He also accused the reporters of working with a hacker to hurt the company and its users. However, a reporter linked to DDoSecrets tweeted "Yes, we have the data" and promised more information "soon enough".


title: Gab (social network)

text: On February 28, DDoSecrets revealed "GabLeaks", a collection of more than 70 gigabytes of data from Gab, including more than 40 million posts, passwords, private messages, and other leaked information. The data was given to the group by a hacktivist self-identifying as "JaXpArO and My Little Anonymous Revival Project", who retrieved the data from Gab's back-end databases to expose the platform's largely right-wing userbase. DDoSecrets co-founder Emma Best called GabLeaks "another gold mine of research for people looking at militias, neo-Nazis, the far right, QAnon and everything surrounding January 6". DDoSecrets said that they would not release the data publicly due to the data containing a large amount of private and sensitive information and will instead share the data with select journalists, social scientists, and researchers. Andy Greenberg from "Wired" confirmed that the data "does appear to contain Gab users' individual and group profiles—their descriptions and privacy settings—public and private posts, and passwords".


title: Gab (social network)

text: In response, Torba acknowledged the data breach, said that his Gab account had been "compromised", and that "the entire company is all hands investigating what happened and working to trace and patch the problem". He also used a transphobic slur to insult the hackers "attacking" Gab and referred to them as "demon hackers". On March 1, Torba revealed in a post on Gab's blog that the company had received a ransom demand of $500,000 in Bitcoin for the data, and wrote in response that they would not be paying it. Also on March 1, Torba said in a Gab post that "I want to make clear that we have zero tolerance for any threats of violence including against the wicked people who are attacking Gab. We need to pray for these people. I am."


title: Gab (social network)

text: Dan Goodin reported in "Ars Technica" on March 2 that Gab's CTO, Fosco Marotto, had in February introduced a SQL vulnerability that may have led to the data breach, and that Gab had subsequently scrubbed the commit from Git history. The company had previously open sourced Gab's source code in a Git repository which included all historical commits; on March 1, they took the repository offline and replaced it with a zipfile that did not include commit history.


title: Gab (social network)

text: On March 8, JaXpArO again compromised verified accounts on Gab, posting a message to their feeds addressed to Torba, which said the service had been "fully compromised" the previous week and accused him of lying to Gab's users. Gab briefly went offline again the same day, and the company wrote on Twitter that they had taken their site offline "to investigate a security breach". Torba posted a statement in response to the attack, claiming that "The attacker who stole data from Gab harvested OAuth2 bearer tokens during their initial attack" and that "Though their ability to harvest new tokens was patched, we did not clear all tokens related to the original attack. By reusing these old tokens, the attacker was able to post 177 statuses in an 8-minute period today".


title: Gab (social network)

text: In May, "The Intercept" used GabLeaks to solicit donations. Former "Intercept" reporter Glenn Greenwald criticized the publication for exploiting what he called an invasion of privacy, which he said contrasted with "The Intercept"'s origins during the Snowden leaks. In response, a spokesperson for "The Intercept" said that "We do not apologize for our interest in reporting on fascist activity."


title: Gab (social network)

text: In early December, Torba claimed that Gab's back-end system was under a cyberattack by "porn bots". Torba called it "the most sophisticated attack we have seen in five years", adding that "the timing of it is incredibly interesting given that Truth Social and Rumble both raised a boatload of cash this week from hedge funds to compete with Gab". On December 4, Torba said that "All new Gab accounts must now be manually approved by our team until further notice". According to "The Daily Beast", "It is unclear whether such a cyberattack took place or what specific "bots" the Gab CEO was referring to but a casual search of the platform does show numerous accounts advertising "escort" services."


title: Gab (social network)

text: On January 24, 2022, Torba announced that Gab would sponsor the America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC) run by white nationalist commentator Nick Fuentes. Torba also criticized the Conservative Political Action Conference and Turning Point USA, saying that "CPAC is sponsored by Facebook and Google among other billionaires" and "TPUSA is sponsored by atheist libertarian billionaires." Torba has also entered into a partnership with Fuentes' livestreaming service. Torba received backlash from Gab users over the sponsorship, with many pointing out that Fuentes had recently made harsh comments about Gab users, including one comment calling users "fucking retarded" and another comment stating: "Average IQ on Gab is like 50". Many of Gab's donors said that they would stop funding Gab. In response to the backlash, Torba said that "Controversy is attention. Attention is influence" and that "The point of marketing is to influence people to get off Big Tech and get on Gab. In order to do that I need their attention." It was later announced that Torba would be a guest speaker at the AFPAC. Torba also created an account on Fuentes' livestreaming service.


title: Gab (social network)

text: In March 2022, "Vice News" reported that RT had started a channel on Gab's video sharing platform Gab TV, which describes itself as a "free speech broadcasting platform." "Vice News" also noted Torba's support for Russia's invasion of Ukraine and Torba publicly supporting RT, claiming that they are being subject to the same censorship as American conservatives "by Big Tech and the globalist regime". Torba also falsely claimed that Gab is "the one place on the internet where you can find RT News" when RT also has a presence on video sharing platform Rumble.


title: Gab (social network)

text: In April 2022, Torba offered Elon Musk a board seat along with equity in Gab in exchange for Musk selling his Twitter shares and investing $2 billion into Gab. This came after Musk sent Twitter an offer to buy the entire company for $43 billion. Also in April, Torba made another offer to Musk, saying "What we are missing at the moment is an ISP. I fear that the next big leap of censorship is at the ISP level, with ISP's blocking access to Gab.com. You solve that problem with Starlink. Together we can build infrastructure for a free speech internet."


title: Gab (social network)

text: On May 15, 2022, after the Buffalo shooting that killed seven Black people, Torba told his followers that procreation is the best solution to the great replacement and White genocide, both of which are unfounded conspiracy theories.


title: Gab (social network)

text: In an email to "The New York Times" regarding a July 2022 article about the rise of white Christian nationalism, Torba wrote, "Jesus Christ is King of Kings and we are going to lawfully, peacefully, and democratically take back this country and our culture in his name" and that "[t]here is absolutely nothing you or any of the other powers and principalities can do to stop us."


title: Gab (social network)

text: In July 2022, Eric Hananoki of "Media Matters for America" revealed that Doug Mastriano, Republican nominee for the 2022 Pennsylvania gubernatorial election, paid Gab $5,000 for "campaign consulting." on April 28, 2022. As a result of the payments, every new account on Gab automatically followed Mastriano's account. Torba claimed that the money did not go towards consulting, but was instead used to pay for advertisements on Gab. Torba also endorsed Mastriano's campaign for Governor of Pennsylvania, calling him "a strong Christian man to lead PA out of the pit of hell and into the glory of God." Torba defended his views on Christian nationalism, saying that "We must be grounded in Biblical Truth and led by people who call Christ their King". The Republican Jewish Coalition denounced the payment, citing Gab as a hotspot for antisemitism and white supremacy. The head of the coalition, Matt Brooks, asked Mastriano to delete his Gab account and terminate all associations with the platform. Mastriano's connection to Gab was additionally condemned by Pennsylvania state representative Dan Frankel (who is Jewish), Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro (who is also Jewish), by Democrats, and by Democratic Jewish organizations. In August 2022, Mastriano released a statement denouncing antisemitism and distanced himself from Torba, saying that he "doesn't speak for me or my campaign". Mastriano also deleted his Gab account.


title: Gab (social network)

text: On February 24, 2019, Gab launched a browser extension called Dissenter, an aggregation and discussion service which allows Gab users to make comments about any webpage including news articles, YouTube videos, and individual social media posts. Comments made using the Dissenter extension are outside of the webpage owner's control, and the extension can be used to comment on websites with no comment feature or where comment sections have been closed. Gab also has a web browser called Dissenter.


title: Gab (social network)

text: Dissenter describes itself as "a free, open-source utility that allows people to dissent from orthodoxy and express what they are really thinking, without fear of reprisal". It was developed as a response to multiple social media platforms' and online news sites' moderation practices, which involved the removal of individual comments or deleting or disabling comment sections altogether. Users with registered Gab accounts may submit content to Dissenter in the form of a URL to a page on which they want to comment. This creates a discussion page where users can post a comment (or "Dissent"), and the comments can be up- or down-voted by other users of the site. By using the Dissenter browser extension, users may read and post comments in an overlay while viewing page content. The Dissenter website also features a news ticker on which users can follow current events. Dissenter also allows users to label their comments as "offensive" or not safe for work (NSFW).


title: Gab (social network)

text: Shortly after its launch, fans of British far-right activist Tommy Robinson began using Dissenter to comment on a BBC News article about Robinson's ban from social media websites following the removal of "Mohammed's Koran", by Robinson and Peter McLoughlin, from Amazon. After Rotten Tomatoes announced that it would be removing its comment section on their review page for the "Captain Marvel" film due to concerns that trolls had planned to flood it with negative reviews, users of Dissenter used the extension to comment about the movie and about Rotten Tomatoes' decision to remove comments.


title: Gab (social network)

text: In a 20-minute Periscope video accompanying the launch, Andrew Torba said that he expected Dissenter to be banned from extension stores and mentioned that Gab might build its own web browser in the future that has Dissenter built-in. In April 2019, Mozilla removed the Dissenter extension from the Firefox Add-ons website for violating the hate speech portion of Mozilla's acceptable use policy. In a statement to the "Columbia Journalism Review", a Mozilla spokesperson said: "Mozilla does not endorse hate speech, and we do not permit our platforms to be used to promote such content". On April 11, Google removed the Dissenter extension from the Chrome Web Store. Later in April, the Gab team forked the Brave web browser in order to bundle Dissenter. Brave CEO Brendan Eich criticized the decision to fork Brave as unnecessary and "parasitic".


title: Gab (social network)

text: Following the extension's launch, Ana Valens of "The Daily Dot" described it as an "extension for the alt-right" to "mobilize against journalists, critics, and progressive websites". Saqib Shah of "Engadget" called Dissenter "a far-right comments section on every site" and Gab's "latest attempt at attracting fringe voices". Izabella Kaminska of the "Financial Times" called Dissenter a "shadow layer" of the Internet.


title: Gab (social network)

text: The site has attracted far-right or alt-right users who have been banned or suspended from other services. Since its foundation in 2016, high-profile participants have included former "Breitbart News" writer and polemicist Milo Yiannopoulos; citizen journalist Tim Pool; conservative commentator Dave Rubin; former British National Party leader Nick Griffin; Australian neo-Nazis Blair Cottrell and Neil Erikson and Australian MP George Christensen; Republican Party representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Paul Gosar; former Republican Party of Texas chairman Allen West; former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon; Dutch politician and Leader of the Party for Freedom Geert Wilders; and white supremacists Richard B. Spencer, Tila Tequila, Vox Day, and Christopher Cantwell. Far-right political parties and party candidates, including Britain First, Spanish Vox, and UKIP candidates such as Mark Meechan and Carl Benjamin, have also been participants.


title: Gab (social network)

text: Following the Christchurch mosque shootings and a reduced tolerance on other social media for hate speech, several members of United Patriots Front, an Australian far-right extremist organization, urged their supporters to follow them on Gab after being banned from Twitter and Facebook. On January 24, 2021, the Republican Party of Texas made a post on its Twitter account asking their followers to join Gab. In March 2021, the Republican Party of Texas voted to delete their Gab account.


title: Gab (social network)

text: Former Gab users include white nationalist political candidate Paul Nehlen, who was removed from the site for doxing the man behind the "Ricky Vaughn" Twitter account; and hacker, internet troll, and former "Daily Stormer" writer Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer, who was banned for calling for genocide against Jews and endorsing terrorist Timothy McVeigh. Auernheimer's activity prompted threats from Gab's then webhost Asia Registry to remove the comments or they would refuse to host the site. Christopher Cantwell, a white supremacist and neo-Nazi activist who "once drove a significant amount of interaction on the small site", was banned from the site in March 2019 after using the site to advocate in the wake of the 2019 Christchurch shootings that future mass killers should target and murder left-wing activists, instead of "random people in mosques and synagogues", in order to effectively silence left-wing activism.


title: Gab (social network)

text: Torba has described the average Gab user as "a Conservative Christian with a family and interests in hunting, fishing, cars, camping, news, politics, rural living, homeschooling, privacy, free speech, cryptocurrency, guns, and cooking". Torba stated in 2016 that Gab is "not designed specifically for conservatives" and has stated that "we welcome everyone and always will" and "We want everyone to feel safe on Gab, but we're not going to police what is hate speech and what isn't", although he admitted that Gab was attracting "a lot of people on the right because they are being censored, so it's understandable they are migrating over". In November 2016, Torba told "The Washington Post" that "I didn't set out to build a 'conservative social network' by any means... but I felt that it was time for a conservative leader to step up and to provide a forum where anybody can come and speak freely without fear of censorship". In filings made with the SEC in March 2018, Gab stated that its target market is "conservative, libertarian, nationalists, and populist internet users around the world" "who are seeking alternative news media platforms like Breitbart.com, DrudgeReport.com, Infowars.com". In an interview with "Vice News" in August 2019, Torba acknowledged that Gab was right-leaning, saying that "any online community that is explicitly pro-free speech will inevitably become right-leaning" and claimed that "this is because in the free market of ideas right-leaning ideas win".


title: Gab (social network)

text: In early 2018, a cross-university group released a research study on posts made to the site. According to that study, the site hosted a high volume of racism and hate speech, and primarily "attracts alt-right users, conspiracy theorists, and other trolls". The study listed Carl Benjamin, Ann Coulter, Alex Jones, Stefan Molyneux, Lauren Southern, and Paul Joseph Watson as some of the more popular users of the site. The authors also performed an automated search using Hatebase and found "hate words" in 5.4% of Gab posts, which they stated was 2.4 times higher than their occurrence on Twitter but less than half that found on /pol/, a political discussion board on 4chan. The authors of the study stated in their conclusion that while anyone can join Gab, the site is aligned with the alt-right and its use of free speech rhetoric "merely functions as a shield for its alt-right users to hide behind".


title: Gab (social network)

text: A 2018 paper authored by behavioral researchers that was presented at the 2018 SBP-BRiMS collected and analyzed "several million Gab messages" posted on the Gab website from the platform's launch in August 2016 to February 2018. The researchers then divided the posts into 33 groups, including topics such as pop culture. The researchers found that the largest category of posts on Gab was politics, comprising 56% of all posts collected and analyzed. The researchers also found that the largest subcategory within politics was "Ideology, religion and race", comprising 10.23% of all posts. According to paper co-author William D. Adler, a political science professor at Northeastern Illinois University, the subcategory "Ideology, religion, and race" "includes topics such as changing racial demographics, threats to Christianity, and concerns about Jewish influence", adding "It's a lot of what you might think of as white nationalism". Other subcategories within politics included conversations about "Trump, Clinton and conspiracies", comprising 5.10% of all posts, and "Globalism", a dog whistle for antisemitic conspiracy theories, comprising 1.95% of all posts. The researchers also linked Gab's growth to the far-right. According to Alder, Gab's free speech rhetoric is "part of the game here, of course", adding that "They don't want to say [what they're really doing] out loud, so they say 'free speech, free speech.'" Based on the results of the paper, Noah Berlatsky of "The Forward" noted: "In contrast, there is little discussion of left topics that might be considered to push the edges of acceptable discourse. There are no Stalinist apologia, for example, nor calls for violent Communist revolution. More, there is not an equivalent on the left for Gab, or for the other right wing social media networks like WrongThink (modeled on Facebook) or GoyFundMe (a right wing Kickstarter, which even has an implicitly anti-Semitic name.) Extremist social media bubbles are not a both sides problem; they are a right-wing phenomenon".


title: Gab (social network)

text: A report issued by the ADL and the Network Contagion Research Institute on March 12, 2019, found that when Twitter bans "extremist voices", Gab's user base grows. Researchers from Northeastern Illinois University publishing in "First Monday" wrote in August 2019 that many of the sites shared by Gab's users "are associated with state-sponsored propaganda from foreign governments". Researchers publishing in "e-Extreme" wrote in October 2020 that many of Gab's users are Trump supporters who feel they are being censored on mainstream platforms, and "this sense of persecution is the reason why many join the platform, while an overarching shared sense of victimhood – whether as members of a 'white race', free-speech absolutists, or Trump supporters – unites the broader community". In 2021, a study published by an international team of researchers titled "Understanding the Effect of Deplatforming on Social Networks". found that being banned on Twitter or Reddit led those users who were banned to join alternative platforms such as Gab or Parler, which have more lax content moderation. The study also found that while users who move to these platforms have their audience potentially reduced, the users exhibit increased activity and toxicity than they did previously. Also in 2021, researchers found that Gab users are "united by a shared sense of techno-social persecution at the hands of 'Big Tech', a commitment to the ultra-libertarian values of the platform, and in many cases, a material investment in Gab as an Alt-Tech project."


title: Gab (social network)

text: In June 2021, the Lowy Institute noted of Gab's userbase that "Regardless of which narrative a user in Gab's far-right community ascribes to, a shared sense of techno-social persecution is what draws them in and unites them. These users feel safe in the knowledge that they can "speak freely" on the platform, with little fear of being banned or even critiqued, regardless of how extreme their views are".


title: Gab (social network)

text: On October 11, 2021, researcher Sefa Ozalp published a report for the ADL's Center on Extremism (COE) titled "For Twitter Users, Gab's Toxic Content is Just a Click Away", which analyzed how many links to Gab's website were shared on Twitter between June 7, 2021, and August 22, 2021. The report found that, during this time period, more than 112,000 tweets were posted that linked to Gab's website (shared by more than 32,700 users) with a potential reach of more than 254 million views. The report also found that the fifty most shared links to Gab on Twitter "were rife with conspiratorial content and misinformation, some promoted by Gab itself via its verified Twitter account". Out of these fifty most shared links, sixteen "promoted misinformation and conspiracy theories about Covid-19" and twenty-one "contained conspiratorial content by Japanese-language accounts", including false claims about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and QAnon. Ozalp said that the ADL was not advocating for Twitter to completely ban Gab or links to Gab from its platform, instead advocating in favor of Twitter more effectively enforcing its current policies against misinformation and hate speech. Ozalp also said of Twitter that "Even if they are not acting like a knowing or willing contributor to anti-vax or anti-Semitism stuff, they are still playing a part in [the] dissemination of these conspiracy theories or hate, probably without wanting to do so". Twitter spokesperson Elizabeth Busby responded to the report by claiming that Twitter takes action against links to third-party websites that "would otherwise violate our policies if their content were posted directly on Twitter", including COVID-19 misinformation. Busby also said that "As ADL's report acknowledges, we continue to improve our approach to mis- and disinformation". Later on October 11, Torba criticized the ADL's report in a blog post, claiming that it was created in an attempt to "pressure Twitter to censor us". He also accused the organization of being an "anti-Christ, Anti-American, and Anti-White hate organization". In a statement, the ADL said that Torba's response "is consistent with other statements from Gab" and that they "speak for themselves". According to Ozalp, the report is part of a "longer running research series" by the ADL that will include more studies on other social media platforms.


title: Gab (social network)

text: In December 2021, researchers at the University of Southern California Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences found that Gab users who shared similar moral values and beliefs with members of their immediate groups were more vulnerable to radicalization, including a higher likelihood of dissemination of hate speech and the use of language intended to dehumanize or threaten violence against users outside of their immediate groups.


title: Gab (social network)

text: A June 2022 report from the Stanford Internet Observatory found that "The deplatforming events following January 6 were a huge boost to Gab, and may have resulted in millions of dollars of income for Gab, potentially keeping it solvent." as well as resulting in "a massive spike in new users" and "thousands of new 'Pro' subscriptions and donations". This helped Gab "fund real-world activities such as the white nationalist AFPAC conference." Gab's growth in users had previously been stagnant with "increasing monetary losses". Secondly, the report found that in 2021 and 2022, Gab "had significant growth in anti-vaccine protest organizing, with 'trucker convoy' groups having tens of thousands of members and high post volume." Thirdly, the report found that "Extreme anti-Semitic, racist and homophobic content is rife [on Gab], with open praise of Nazism, encouragement of violence against minorities, and 'Great Replacement' narratives.", with "such content appear[ing] even in 'mainstream' user groups." Lastly, the report found that "Gab contains much of the same toxic content as "purpose-built" neo-Nazi sites such as Stormfront".


title: Gab (social network)

text: In early February 2021, multiple media outlets falsely reported that former-President Trump had joined Gab under the handle @realdonaldtrump. "The Independent" speculated "that confusion arose from the presence of a blue check mark indicating the account was verified" and "Vice News" speculated that the bio of the account, which read "45th President of the United States of America. Uncensored posts from the @realDonaldTrump Feed", had also caused confusion.


title: Gab (social network)

text: The Gab post that was mistaken to be from Trump was actually from Torba and featured a copy of a genuine letter sent by Trump's lawyers to Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin, who had called on Trump to testify at his second impeachment hearing. Thousands of users on Gab were also led to believe after the post was made that Trump had joined the platform under the handle. Torba responded to the false reports in a blog post, saying that "@realdonaldtrump is and always has been a mirror archive of POTUS' tweets and statements that we've run for years. We've always been transparent about this and would obviously let people know if the President starts using it". He also criticized the media outlets that falsely reported that Trump had joined the platform. Also in response to the false reports, the @realdonaldtrump Gab account made a post that was pinned saying that the account is reserved for Trump and urged users of Gab to send messages to Trump asking him to join the platform.


title: Gab (social network)

text: In March 2021, Forbes reported that representatives of former Senior Advisor Jared Kushner in January had asked for equity in Gab in exchange for Kushner's father-in-law Trump joining the platform. Torba declined the offer, saying "No, I'm not entertaining that".


title: Gab (social network)

text: In a June 2021 interview with far-right conspiracy theory website TruNews, Torba claimed that Kushner wanted Gab to remove antisemitic content and users from its platform before Trump could join, saying that "He called them Jew-haters, I called them Jew criticizers" and that "It's a free-speech platform, so as long as you're not saying anything illegal, as long as you're not making threats of violence, you're allowed to speak your mind and have an opinion about things, and I was not going to compromise on that position". No independent confirmation has been made that such a negotiation took place.


title: Gab (social network)

text: In August 2022, Adam Bies, a man in rural Mercer County, Pennsylvania, was charged with making death threats against FBI agents on Gab after the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. Torba had given data from Bies to the FBI, including an email, IP addresses, and chat logs. In response, Gab users accused Torba of betraying Gab's userbase and commitment to free speech, as well as likening Torba to Judas Iscariot, the disciple who betrayed Jesus. Many users criticized Torba for giving the data to the FBI without a subpoena. In response, Torba did not apologize for cooperating with the FBI, said that "threatening anyone—federal agent or not—is not the right way to do it", and said that Gab is dedicated to upholding "lawful speech and lawful speech only." While some Gab users accepted the response from Torba, others continued to criticize him. In response to the continued criticism, Torba said that "People who threaten to murder people on the internet are not my 'pals,'".


title: Gab (social network)

text: In late July 2021, Torba claimed in a Gab post that he was "getting flooded" with text messages from members of the U.S. military who claimed that they would be court-martialed if they refused a COVID-19 vaccine. The post amassed 10,000 likes and shares. Torba also posted documents on Gab's news site that contain misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine and claimed in an email in response to "The New York Times" that "I'm telling the truth" and "Your Facebook-funded 'fact checkers' like Graphika are wrong and are the people peddling disinformation here". Torba also posted a conversation he had with the "Times" reporter, saying "I am sharing this all with you now to let you know how these wicked people operate and to shine a light on their lies, deception, and anti-Christian attacks. They aren't just attacking me, they are attacking any and all dissent and opposition to their libido dominandi (lust for power)".


title: Gab (social network)

text: In August 2021, Alex Kaplan of "Media Matters for America" noted that Torba "is trying to use his platform to sabotage coronavirus vaccination efforts".


title: Gab (social network)

text: In October 2021, John Gallagher of "LGBTQ Nation" wrote that "A visitor to Gab will find misinformation about COVID, calls to arrest NIH [NIAID] head Dr. Anthony Fauci, and lies about the 2020 presidential election. One post, liked by more than 4,000 people, shows a gloating Trump under the line, 'Show me a pic of pregnant Michelle Obama, and I'll concede the 2020 election.'"


title: Gab (social network)

text: On March 14, 2022, Torba shared a baseless QAnon conspiracy theory claiming that Trump was mispronouncing the word "China" on purpose to secretly signal that Ukraine was behind the development of COVID-19.


title: Gab (social network)

text: In November 2021, when asked by "The Washington Post" about Gab's Brazilian user base, Torba responded in an email on November 8, saying "Ya my comment is 'God bless Jair Bolsonaro and Jesus Christ is King.' No further comment."


title: Gab (social network)

text: , Gab has 4million registered users. According to Micah Lee writing for "The Intercept", the "vast majority" of registered Gab accounts are inactive, and the number of active users on the site is closer to 100,000. In 2021, Torba claimed that Gab has 15 million unique monthly visitors. As of August 2021, Torba has more than 3 million followers on Gab, with all Gab users following him by default.


title: Gab (social network)

text: Rita Katz, a researcher and analyst of terrorism and extremism, wrote in "Politico Magazine" in October 2018 that Robert Bowers' extreme antisemitic postings were "anything but an anomaly" on the website, and, "[they highlight] concerns about its growing facilitation of white nationalism and other far-right movements". She found that Gab user profiles often contained Nazi symbolism, and Stormfront users had praised the site as a place to post antisemitic content. Katz found that many Gab users were celebrating immediately after Bowers' massacre against the Tree of Life synagogue, and wrote that far-right communities' rise to popularity on Gab is "remarkably similar" to the rise of ISIS on social media. In November 2018, Twitter user Jason Baumgartner, who owns a website dedicated to detecting hate speech on social media, found that using the search term "oven" on Gab brought up the terms "Jews", "Holocaust", and "Hitler" the most among thousands of analyzed comments.


title: Gab (social network)

text: Joshua Fisher-Birch of the Counter Extremism Project said in 2019: "Gab has always been attractive to fascist and neo-Nazi groups that advocate violence". The same month, non-profit left-wing media collective Unicorn Riot discovered that individual Gab users led by alt-right figure Brittany Pettibone organized on the video game chat and VoIP platform Discord and that some of the discussions centered on antisemitism and achieving "ethno-nationalism". "The Jewish Chronicle" reported in January 2019 that they had found material on the site accusing Jews of responsibility for the September 11 attacks. After setting up a fake account on Gab, the newspaper's journalist Ben Weich was quickly "presented with a steady stream of Holocaust denial, antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories – as well as those venerating Adolf Hitler". Posts he discovered included at least one user who used a swastika as their profile picture and stated: "The parasitic Jews will fully deserve the genocide that's coming upon them" and "They do not deserve mercy, expulsion will never fix a rat problem, extermination does".


title: Gab (social network)

text: In addition to allowing Holocaust denial and other forms of antisemitism, Gab has been used as a recruitment tool by several neo-Nazi and alt-right groups, including Identity Evropa, Patriot Front, and the Atomwaffen Division, a terrorist organization tied to a number of murders.


title: Gab (social network)

text: Gab itself has engaged in antisemitic commentary. Torba has repeatedly praised Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.


title: Gab (social network)

text: On August 9, 2018, in response to a post from Jewish political activist Brian Krassenstein calling for the shutdown of the site, Gab's Twitter account responded with a post suggesting that it is unsurprising for a person with a Jewish last name to oppose "free speech", followed by a tweet from the platform calling for "open borders for Israel", a quote from former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, and posted another tweet the same hour with a citation to a Bible verse () that referred to Jewish non-believers of Jesus as members of the "synagogue of Satan". The company's Twitter account also posted a tweet on August 9 alluding to the antisemitic trope of Jewish global control, saying "At some point you have to ask yourself: just who is pushing for the censorship?". On October 31, 2018, "The Washington Post" pointed to two messages on Gab's Twitter account and wrote that they "raise questions about whether they cross the line into impropriety". One captioned a photo of two men, one with Jewish sidelocks, with "These two guys show up at your front door. Who do you let in and who do you call the cops on?" before following it up with "I mean I'm calling the cops on both and getting my shotgun ready, just saying", and another argued for opposition to immigration by saying: "Let a bunch of Somalians migrate to your neighborhood and see if you change your mind". Torba initially questioned the authenticity of the posts, suggesting they might be doctored images, later saying the posts were "clearly satire/comedy... to get people discussing the importance of free expression for satire, comedy, political discourse, and legitimate criticism", and then later saying they were "a few edgy tweets posted by interns". The tweets were later deleted.


title: Gab (social network)

text: On January 14, 2021, Molly Boigon from "The Forward" noted that Gab's Twitter account had recently posted multiple tweets about Senior Adviser Jared Kushner's supposed influence on then-President Trump, which she described as a nod to the antisemitic trope about global Jewish puppet masters. Gab's Twitter account had also recently posted a tweet questioning the legitimacy of antisemitism falling under hate speech. In February 2021, Gab posted on their Twitter account that going forward, they would only respond to press inquiries from "Christian media compan[ies]", describing other publications as "pagan propogandists". In March 2021, Ali Breland reported in "Mother Jones" on private messages leaked in that month's data breach, which showed Torba welcoming Iranian-American alt-right personality Roosh V and praising another Gab user, the antisemitic writer E. Michael Jones. Oren Segal of the ADL said that the messages seemed "to show that Torba has a direct appreciation for individuals that promote antisemitism and hate". In June 2021, Torba criticized Rumble for changing its terms of service to prohibit antisemitic hate speech and questioned why the platform did not also prohibit "Anti-White hatred". Also in June 2021, Tom McKay from "Gizmodo" wrote that "Torba is perhaps best known for furious diatribes in which he characterizes claims that he or his shitty site is racist or anti-Semitic as left-wing media smears, despite bounteous evidence suggesting that is exactly what they are".


title: Gab (social network)

text: On October 13, 2021, Torba used Gab's Twitter account to praise E. Michael Jones, an antisemitic Catholic writer, calling him a "brilliant and faithful Christian man" who will be "one of the most respected thinkers of our time" when "we win." Jones has claimed that Jews are dedicated to attacking the Catholic Church and western civilization.


title: Gab (social network)

text: On October 17, 2021, Torba used Gab's Twitter account to tweet a screenshot of a post from a Gab user named "Kitler". The post states that "if you're a White person living in America today and you don't know what happened to the kulaks in russia [sic] 100 years ago, you should look it up. Something very similar is happening to you right now, and the same group of people is behind it." The Gab post alludes to the belief that Jews were responsible for the 1917 Russian Revolution and communism while also implying that Jews were responsible for the subsequent efforts by the Bolsheviks to seize land from kulaks (wealthy farmers) and deport kulaks to the remote regions of the Soviet Union. One user replied to Gab's tweet with a screenshot of a page from Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf".


title: Gab (social network)

text: On October 19, 2021, Torba used the Gab Twitter account to post a series of tweets which "The Daily Dot" characterized as a "wildly antisemitic tirade" with "several antisemitic canards related to Judeo–Bolshevism". Torba also promoted the creation of a "parallel Christian society." After receiving criticism for these remarks, Torba responded by saying that "Sadly many Christians today are so afraid of being called a silly meaningless name by the world (bigot, antisemite, homophobe) that they refuse to even remotely share or discuss the Gospel in their daily lives, let alone live it" and that "You reveal your anti-Christian hatred when you refer to Biblical Truth as 'antisemitism.'" Shortly after making these comments, Torba shared a comic from far-right illustrator StoneToss, which promotes the antisemitic myth that Jews were responsible for crucifying Jesus. Torba also retweeted a meme claiming that the Talmud, the central text of Rabbinic Judaism, instructs Jews to hate Christians. Shortly after posting these tweets, Torba deactivated Gab's Twitter account. Torba has deactivated the account multiple times in the past, which some researchers have said is a strategy to avoid being suspended from Twitter. Gab's Twitter account was reactivated around late November 2021. The ADL "found dozens of examples of antisemitic tweets in the replies to Gab's tweets from" October. "These replies promoted various tropes about Jews, including that Jews are 'degenerate' and the 'synagogue of Satan.'" The ADL also criticized Twitter for continuing "to allow content that violates its own policies via links to Gab's website, where harmful disinformation and offensive content run rampant."


title: Gab (social network)

text: According to the ADL, "Throughout October and early November 2021, Torba used his own platform, Gab, which has considerably fewer content guardrails and restrictions than mainstream sites, to disseminate a plethora of antisemitic content. These posts often include vague references to 'them' or 'the enemy' and are framed by Torba's Christian faith." On November 2, 2021, Torba posted on Gab that "Zionists" created the Federal Reserve for the "subversion of American Christianity." One user responded by claiming that non-Jews became "slaves of the [Jewish] tribe" due to a plot orchestrated by the Jewish Rothschild family. On November 4, 2021, Torba reposted Gab user Jacob Wohl's "suggestion" that all Jews should decorate their home with Christmas decorations during Christmas to assimilate into America's Christian heritage. One user responded by suggested that Jews control the Federal Reserve and that Jewish banker Jacob Schiff funded and orchestrated the Russian Revolution. Both suggestions are references to antisemitic tropes.


title: Gab (social network)

text: In January 2022, Mira Fox from "The Forward" noted that Gab "has weaponized antisemitism and Christian extremism to foment insurrection". Fox also noted that "Torba himself has authored numerous articles demonizing Jews for a variety of ills, including a piece on the Ukrainian Holodomor famine that opens by wondering, speciously, why it is not considered a tragedy at the level of the Holocaust, and ends by implying the Holodomor was a Jewish attempt to wipe out Ukrainian Christians – and, in a pointed aside, noting that Biden's cabinet also includes many Jews."


title: Gab (social network)

text: In late July 2022, "Media Matters" published an article highlighting Torba's reposting of antisemitic statements that doubt the Holocaust, accuse Jews of being too powerful, and blame them for the killing of Jesus.


title: Gab (social network)

text: In August 2022, in response to an interview of ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, Torba said that "We're not bending the knee to the 2 percent anymore", in reference to the percentage of Jewish people in the United States.


title: Gab (social network)

text: Gab's official policy states that the company has a "zero-tolerance policy towards threats of violence and use of our platform for criminal purposes".


title: Gab (social network)

text: Terrorism researcher and Queen's University in Kingston, professor Amarnath Amarasingam has said that Gab's position as neither extremely mainstream nor obscure service has allowed extremists to permeate the website and access an audience they would not be able to have on a more popular service, where they would be more likely to be banned.


title: Gab (social network)

text: Gab has denied that terror groups flourish on the website, saying in a statement to "Motherboard" in July 2019: "We don't want them, we strongly discourage them from joining and we ban them when they cross the line, as they often do". However, Ben Makuch of "Motherboard" wrote that neo-Nazi terrorist groups have "enjoyed months-long, unfettered stints posting their content on Gab to a significant audience". In addition to calls for terrorist attacks, mass killings against minorities, offline armed training recruitments and white supremacist propaganda accumulated on Gab, Makuch pointed to one Gab post, from a user who is a member of an multinational militant network on Gab connected to the Atomwaffen Division, that had explicitly called for its followers to attack electric grids. Other content posted by the network included explicit calls for sympathizers to join local neo-Nazi organizations and commit violence against Muslim and Jewish communities. In June 2019, two British men were arrested on terror offences for posting propaganda on Gab calling for their followers to assassinate Prince Harry.


title: Gab (social network)

text: Gab claims that its platform does not restrict content unless the content is not protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Restrictions on content on Gab include illegal activity, credible threats of violence, promotion of terrorism, obscenity, pornography, spamming, selling weapons or drugs, child exploitation, impersonation, and doxing.


title: Gab (social network)

text: In January 2021, Jazmin Goodwin of CNN described Gab's moderation as "lax" and that this "approach on content has made way for a slew of QAnon conspiracy theories, misinformation and anti-Semitic commentary on the platform, among lots of vile hatred and racist posts – much of wouldn't be allowed on today's well-known social apps". In October 2021, Cristiano Lima of "The Washington Post" described Gab's moderation as "laissez-faire".


title: Gab (social network)

text: In a 2022 email, Torba said that "We tolerate 'offensive' but legal speech", that "We believe that a moderation policy which adheres to the First Amendment, thereby permitting offensive content to rise to the surface, is a valuable and necessary utility to society.", and that "Supporting the mission of freedom online means having the stomach to accept that people will say 'edgy and offensive' things". In June 2022, Torba told CNN that "Gab permits all lawful political speech that is protected by the First Amendment—including speech about inherently political topics such as the charge and punishment of treason through the US judicial system. When discussion crosses into direct and imminent threats of violence we will take action and work with our partners in law enforcement to mitigate any threats to the public."


title: Gab (social network)

text: On December 14, 2016, Apple Inc. declined Gab's submission of its app to the Apple App Store, citing pornographic content as the reason. Also on December 14, Twitter cut off Gab's access to the Twitter API after Gab introduced a feature to its social network that allowed users to share their Gab posts directly to Twitter. In response, Torba said in a December 15 Periscope livestream that "This is targeted, and we believe that we're being singled out" and that "This is the nonsense from Silicon Valley. This is the monopoly and level of control that they have". On January 21, 2017, a revised version of the app that blocked pornography by default was also rejected due to "objectionable content" including "references to religion, race, gender, sexual orientation, or other targeted groups that could be offensive to many users". In response, Torba accused Apple of "double standards and extreme scrutiny" "while allowing Big Social apps to display the same and arguably worse content in their own apps". Gab launched its Android app for the Google Play Store in May 2017. Later that year, on August 17, Google removed Gab's app from the Play Store for violating its policy against hate speech, stating that the app did not "demonstrate a sufficient level of moderation, including for content that encourages violence and advocates hate against groups of people". On September 14, 2017, Gab filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, but dropped the suit on October 22, 2017, in favor of lobbying Congress to take action against "monopolized tech giants". In early October 2018, Gab's Stripe account was suspended due to adult content on Gab. On October 3, Gab tweeted in response: "We've had this content and a NSFW setting for two years with no issues from them until now".


title: Gab (social network)

text: On October 27, 2018, the day of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, PayPal, GoDaddy, and Medium terminated their relationship with Gab, and PayPal released a statement that it had done so based on its review of accounts that may engage in the "perpetuation of hate, violence or discriminatory intolerance". Later on the same day, Gab announced on Twitter that Joyent, Gab's hosting provider, would terminate their service on October 29 at 9:00 am ET. Gab also said on Twitter that they expected their site to be down for weeks. Stripe and Backblaze also terminated their services with Gab after the shooting. On October 29, Gab claimed in a tweet that they "took the site down early on purpose last night because we knew the media would take the bait and have stories on it for this morning". After the site was taken down, Gab's homepage was changed to a message saying it was down due to being "under attack" and being "systematically no-platformed", adding that Gab would be inaccessible for a "period of time".


title: Gab (social network)

text: Gab returned online on November 4, 2018, after Epik agreed to register the domain, and Sibyl Systems Ltd. began to provide webhosting. Epik is an American company that provides domain registration and other web services, and is known for providing services to websites that host far-right, neo-Nazi, and other extremist content. Sibyl Systems was founded on October 22, 2018, days before the shooting that resulted in Gab's termination from their previous webhost, and according to the SPLC, was possibly based in Norway or England. Sibyl was later acquired by Epik in the second quarter of 2019.


title: Gab (social network)

text: In August 2019, Amazon Web Services ceased serving Gab's fundraising site due to Gab violating Amazon's policy on hateful content. In response, Torba said he welcomed Amazon's decision, claiming that media coverage of the decision had only brought more attention to Gab and resulted in investment offers.


title: Gab (social network)

text: , Gab was still using Epik as a domain registrar. Instead of hosting its service in the cloud, "The Wall Street Journal" reported that Gab had been renting hardware in an undisclosed data center. Gab was also using services from Cloudflare.


title: Gab (social network)

text: Gab has been described as "Twitter for racists" by progressive news outlet "Salon", a "hate-filled echo chamber of racism and conspiracy theories" by "The Guardian", an "online cesspool of anti-Semitism" by "Politico Magazine", a "safe haven for banned Twitter trolls, Gamergaters, Pizzagaters and high-profile white nationalists" by "Mic", "the far-right's favorite social network" by "The Verge", "the Make America Great Again of social sites" by "The New York Times" and "an almost anti-Twitter" by NPR. "Wired" criticized Gab for not explicitly prohibiting hate speech. Scholars have described Gab as "hateful", and named Gab along with 4chan and 8chan as directly radicalizing men who went on to commit violent acts. The SPLC characterized Gab as a site where its users are "radicalized aggressively". Heidi Beirich, a director of the center, stated that the site is "the number one place nowadays where white supremacists gather". The ADL called Gab a "fringe online community" and "a bastion of hatred and bigotry".


title: Gab (social network)

text: Harrison Kaminsky of "Digital Trends" questioned the site's longevity in September 2016, writing: "While the site's initial popularity is impressive, the potential is most likely short-lived, following the life cycle of social networks like Ello or Peach, which faded over time". Maya Kosoff of "Vanity Fair" wrote in September 2016: "the point of Gab may not be to grow to be a Twitter competitor... it's providing a 'safe space' for people who want to express themselves without consequence". Amanda Hess, a critic at "The New York Times", opined in November 2016 that the site is: "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". BBC News wrote in December 2016 that Gab has "become the go-to social network for an extreme group of activists who have been chucked off of Twitter" and that "Its top hashtags list is a conservative dream. It's peppered with trends like #Trump, #MAGA ("Make America Great Again" - Trump's campaign slogan) along with far-right obsessions like Dump Star Wars and the Pizzagate conspiracy hoax".


title: Gab (social network)

text: Jeremy Carl of conservative magazine "National Review" opined in August 2017: "Contrast the free hand given to left-wing offensive speech to the strict controls put on right-wing speech. As just one of many examples, Gab— a free-speech social network that has grown rapidly to almost a quarter million users since its public launch just a few months ago, was just yesterday kicked off the Android app store (it has already been repeatedly denied at Apple) for "hate speech". To be clear, not all the voices on Gab are mellifluous, they have accepted a number of folks, often from the far right, who have been banned from other social networks (though this is a small portion of Gab's user base)" and "If Google and Apple are banning Gab, mainstream conservatives are crazy to think they are safe". Cheryl K. Chumley of conservative newspaper "The Washington Times" opined in October 2018: "with help from like-minded free thinkers, Gab can beat the leftists running these Internet sites at their own game — and in so doing, become the model for "what could one day be" for the conservative world on social media". Joe Setyon reviewed the social network for libertarian magazine "Reason" in October 2018, writing: "in fighting the alleged left-leaning political bias of the legacy social media platforms, Gab ran into the opposite problem". He suggested that the website was only for those who "subscribe to a certain radical subset of right-wing beliefs or are interested in seeing the feeds of those who do". Nicholas Thompson of "Wired" questioned the sincerity of the site's claim to be a defender for "free speech" in October 2018, writing: "To many people, Torba's First Amendment absolutism is just a talking point. The site exists less to defend the ideals of Benjamin Franklin than those of Christopher Cantwell. It chose as its logo a creature that looks rather like Pepe, the alt-right attack frog. It courted people on the far right, and it became a haven for them. Free speech can be less a principle than a smokescreen". Thompson noted that Robert Bowers likely expected affirmation from his last message that indicated his intent to carry out the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, leading Thompson to the conclusion: "if it's a platform where someone can expect affirmation for threatening slaughter, then why should anyone help it exist?"


title: Gab (social network)

text: Kelly Weill of "The Daily Beast" wrote in January 2019: "Gab has always been a bad website. Nothing loads, the search function is a joke, and its member rolls are riddled with porn bots. And that's even without the neo-Nazis posting racist memes and goading each other to murder". In February 2020, Tanya Basu of "MIT Technology Review" characterized Gab as being frequented by "fringe far-right hate groups". In January 2021, Travis M. Andrews of "The Washington Post" said that Gab "has welcomed extremist right-wing figures and believers of QAnon, the loose collection of conspiracy theories that touch on everything from politics to COVID-19". In August 2021, Jacob Silverman of "The New Republic" wrote that Torba is "Trying to Build a White, Christian, Secessionist Tech Industry" and that Torba "represents the new, even more right-wing alternative to Silicon Valley". In September 2021, Whitney Kimball of "Gizmodo" wrote that Gab is "currently fashioning itself as an anti-mask LinkedIn with a job board and guidelines for getting vaccine exemptions". In December 2021, David Gilbert of "Vice News" called Gab "a Christian-focused social network".