There was a blue check mark next to Robert Bowers's name, meaning that the social media account was verified.
There was a blue check mark next to Robert Bowers’s name, meaning that the social media account was verified. His bio said that “jews are the children of satan,” his banner image a clear reference to a white supremacist meme. His last message, posted Saturday morning, read, “Screw your optics, I’m going in.”
The account is believed to belong to the same Robert Bowers who is suspected of opening fire in a Pittsburgh synagogue, killing 11 people and wounding six others.
The profile, which has since been removed, lived on Gab, a social media platform that has become a haven for white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other adherents to extreme ideologies that have found themselves increasingly unwelcome on Twitter and Facebook.
Founder Andrew Torba has long said Gab is simply a “free speech” platform for anyone who wants to join, and has responded aggressively to characterizations otherwise. But the platform’s history is tied to the white supremacists and other far-right figures who joined in its first months and have contributed to Gab’s growth.
In the wake of the Pittsburgh attack, Gab and Torba have girded themselves for war. On his Gab account, Torba criticized mainstream media stories about his site and promised users that it would survive the increased attention. After Gab was banned from PayPal and received notice from Joyent, its hosting provider, that it would pull their service, Torba wrote early Sunday that “GAB IS NOT GOING ANYWHERE I don’t care what we have to do, I don’t care what it takes. We will build everything from the ground up if we have to. ”
Torba’s updates have kept Gab’s users in the loop on the drama: Gab’s chief technology officer Ekrem Büyükkaya announced Sunday that he was stepping down because the “attacks from the American press have been relentless for two years now and have taken a toll on me personally.” Later that morning, Torba said he’d secured a new host for his site.
Medium, the publishing platform, has suspended Gab’s account there, according to Gab. And GoDaddy informed Gab that they had violated their terms of service, giving them 24 hours to move their domain to another provider.
On Monday, Gab went offline. Visitors to the network were instead greeted with a short message, saying that Gab had been “no-platformed by App Stores, multiple hosting providers, and several payment processors,” and “smeared by the mainstream media.”
“As we transition to a new hosting provider Gab will be inaccessible for a period of time. We are working around the clock to get Gab.com back online.” Meanwhile, Gab’s verified Twitter account continued to retweet supporters and argue with critics.
Gab, through Torba, has always pitched itself as an alternative to Silicon Valley social media sites, attracting a user base of people who believe companies such as Twitter and Facebook are deliberately censoring their views. In 2016, when Twitter strengthened its policy against “hateful conduct” and banned a number of far-right and white supremacist accounts, Torba said Gab gained 60,000 users in eight days.
The platform itself is a combination of many of the sites that Gab would like to replace. The site works like a hybrid of Reddit and Twitter, where users can post character-limited messages, and respond, comment and vote other users’ posts up or down. Alex Jones, who has 55,000 followers on Gab, often promotes his live broadcasts there because he has been banned from YouTube and Twitter.
But Gab is more than a platform. It’s also positioned itself as a key figure in the right-wing response to online crackdowns of extremist views, and has benefited directly from the white supremacists who flocked to Gab on the promise that their views would not be censored, according to Joan Donovan, the media manipulation and platform accountability research lead at Data and Society, who has followed the site’s growth.
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Migrant caravan takes a break in southern Mexico before pushing on to U. S. Torba has become a charismatic leader of the “alt-tech” movement which, among other things, dedicates itself to protecting and building tech to house “free speech” – including extremist ideologies that are increasingly unwelcome on mainstream sites. When James Damore was fired from Google in 2017 for writing a viral memo about women in tech, Torba capitalized on the case’s media attention to promote an “alt-tech revolution,” where conservative tech workers would rise up and topple Silicon Valley giants. Gab, of course, would be there to take their place.
Although the revolution did not come to pass as predicted, Torba managed to raise $80,000 for a crowdfunding campaign to support his website in the days after Damore’s story published, The Washington Post reported at the time. He also gained the currency of media attention, giving interviews to several mainstream outlets – including The Post – promoting his site as a mainstream technology alternative.
Donovan noted that Gab has used crackdowns such as the “hateful conduct” rule enforcement on Twitter to recruit for his own site. Gab “rode the wave of attention to white nationalists after Charlottesville to populate its social media platform,” Donovan said in an interview Sunday. In the wake of the deadly Charlottesville protests in 2017, major companies such as Apple, PayPal and Squarespace began removing white nationalists from their platforms, leaving them with fewer options for making money and hosting their views online.
Gab was there to pick up the slack. “Over the past year, Gab has been able to grow and add new features, premium features, streaming features,” Donovan said, “because of the fusion of the white supremacist need for platforms” and the website’s promise of a free-speech haven.
In the Pittsburgh attack’s aftermath, Christopher Cantwell – one of Gab’s most prominent anti-Semites who achieved notoriety during last year’s Charlottesville rally – began trafficking in anti-Jewish statements and conspiracy theories that the gunman was a plant from American spies to foment anger against conservatives before the midterm elections.
Cantwell, known as the “Crying Nazi,” made a name for himself during the Charlottesville rally when he pepper-sprayed counterprotesters and was featured in a viral Vice documentary. On Gab, he frequently bashes Jews and African Americans and encourages followers to listen to his podcast, “Radical Agenda.”
He also attacks the news media, though he seems to have an affinity for Fox News.
