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A reminder that Gab is not a gray area edgecase, but a purpose-built platform for conspiracies and hate speech.

djsumdog 6y ago
and why does that matter? They later switched to ActivityPub/Mastodon for a bit. They still run a Mastodon fork, but defederated back in May. Gab was also banned explicitly by URL by any app makers and in many ActivityPub libraries (you can find checks where it hashes the URL and compares it to known Gab URLs). > a purpose-built platform for conspiracies and hate speech We're in a bizarre world right now where you can label any opinion you don't agree with as hate speech, dehumanize police and call every conservative a literal Nazi and that's all okay now for some reason. At some point we have to remember that historically, a lot of people who thought they were right, about slavery, homosexuality, war, abortion, polygamy, and other controversial topics, eventually came down on the wrong side of history. The attack on speech and ideas has never been more profound. If you don't like an idea, you don't have to listen, but people are going to continue to go to fringes whenever their voices are silences. That will create more extreme platforms and more extremism, not less.
- cecja 6y ago
  There is holocaust denying, calls to kill blacks and rape fantasies about female politicians and movie stars. There are literal calls for the rise of the white race to eradicate everyone else on the front page of gab daily. If you want to defend shit like this on the merit of free speech the probability that you are in fact a white nationalist are not to far. And the history is plastered with censorship the world was never more free than it is now you are just repeating non facts without even doing a hint of research.
- dTal 6y ago
  Ah, the delicious irony of attacking certain types of speech and ideas as "attacks on speech and ideas". What they are doing and what you are doing are no different; it's all just politics. There's not even anything new about what's happening today. How do you think people's minds were changed on all those "controversial" topics you cite? A whole lot of social pressure. You don't get to make lofty statements about free speech, and then turn around and grumble that other people's speech somehow isn't "playing fair".
gruez 6y ago
>but a purpose-built platform for conspiracies and hate speech Can you elaborate on this?
- simias 6y ago
  https://gab.com/ https://gab.com/ Just decide for yourself. Literally the first post I get at the moment comes from "QAnon and the Great Awakening" and is in support of that right-wing vigilante shooter in Kenosha, calling the district attorney who's prosecuting him "evil". The next few posts I see mention either "arresting the dems", some anti-vax stuff and so many crypto-fascist dogwhistles that I'm getting tinnitus. If you need more proof I'll let you ding into this.
- snypher 6y ago
  A good start is the Wikipedia page; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network)
  - gruez 6y ago
    The line of thinking seems to be: "Gab's target demographic is users that have been banned from the mainstream platforms for hate speech and conspiracies. Therefore by targeting those users, it's 'purpose built' for hate speech and conspiracies.". My question is, can't you apply this to basically anything that's "free speech"? The mechanism seems to be that most people are content with the mainstream platforms, and therefore the only people who go for the "free speech" platforms end up being the people who were banned from the mainstream platforms. By that logic, is tor "purpose built" for criminals, since basically only people with stuff to hide use it? How is it different than gab?
    - simias 6y ago
      If your site has been overrun by ultra-far-right types for basically its entire existence and you do nothing to mitigate this then you're very clearly complicit. But you're right, most of the "no moderation, anything goes" online communities tend to be overrun by extremists but it's easy to see why: you only need a minority of very dedicated trolls posting outrageous content 24/7 to ruin a community. It takes time and effort to post insightful content and analysis, meanwhile you can throw shit at the walls at a large scale very easily. That's why it's pretty obvious to me that if you want to actually have interesting discussions online and a plurality of opinions you need moderation, otherwise the low effort bullies take over.
oehpr 6y ago
I'm not deeply versed in Gab's history... But lets hypothetically say that Gab was not created for that purpose, but for precisely the purpose it claims it was created for: To be an open platform for free speech, no censorship. Wouldn't it have ended up in the exact same state it is now? Any service that guarantees no censorship is going to have the majority of its userbase be the runoff from other major websites. When voat was created, I 100% believed that they were not attempting to create extremist havens, but their userbase was all the people expelled from reddit for targeted harassment campaigns. I hate this dynamic. We need a way to break this cycle, because right now it's actively killing competitors to existing social networks.
- ascorbic 6y ago
  If they didn't intend it, they were being incredibly naive. If your defining characteristic is that you don't censor things that are banned on Reddit, then your site is only attractive to people who want to do things banned on Reddit.
  - sipos 6y ago
    It wasn't just Reddit they were fleeing. I think it was Twitter too...
    - FalconSensei 6y ago
      yes. So again... Reddit and Twitter are already a cesspool of hate. If you are bad enough to be banned there...
- sipos 6y ago
  Wikipedia cites a articles that show a number of examples of the company Twitter acocunt saying anti-semetic things, for example https://web.archive.org/web/20181031162843/https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/30/tech/gab-anti-semitic-speech-invs/ https://web.archive.org/web/20181031162843/https://www.cnn.c.... I agree with your point - it is hard to tell the difference generally, and it is an important point to remember, but the behaviour of the company itself shows that it is not an issue this time.
centimeter 6y ago
I follow comedians on there that got banned from twitter because they said a bad word.
G4E 6y ago
A reminder that Fdroid allows you to run your own repo and host there whatever you choose, controversial or not. Fdroid banned this particuliar app (and maybe others, that's not the point) from their own official repo.
blahblahblogger 6y ago
From my perspective we still need other information, do they also ban other apps that are purpose-built for hate speech? Was it just this app because of the controversy over banned Twitter users going to it? I'm not taking a side either way but am curious.
csomar 6y ago
Isn't that why F-Droid was created for in the first place?
renewiltord 6y ago
Okay come on. This sequence of comments is funny, you have to admit. "Google is censoring apps" "It's because those apps can access hate speech" "You can use this other app store" "They ban this app, though" "But that's because it's for hate speech" Come on, this is peak comedy.
- Carioca 6y ago
  > those apps can access hate speech > it's for hate speech There's a big difference here and you seem to know it
  - mav3rick 6y ago
    Yes, as soon as the narrative went against HNs own point the discussion stopped.
young_unixer 6y ago
> but a purpose-built platform for conspiracies and hate speech. That's just false.
ManlyBread 6y ago
And?

and why does that matter? They later switched to ActivityPub/Mastodon for a bit. They still run a Mastodon fork, but defederated back in May. Gab was also banned explicitly by URL by any app makers and in many ActivityPub libraries (you can find checks where it hashes the URL and compares it to known Gab URLs). > a purpose-built platform for conspiracies and hate speech We're in a bizarre world right now where you can label any opinion you don't agree with as hate speech, dehumanize police and call every conservative a literal Nazi and that's all okay now for some reason. At some point we have to remember that historically, a lot of people who thought they were right, about slavery, homosexuality, war, abortion, polygamy, and other controversial topics, eventually came down on the wrong side of history. The attack on speech and ideas has never been more profound. If you don't like an idea, you don't have to listen, but people are going to continue to go to fringes whenever their voices are silences. That will create more extreme platforms and more extremism, not less.

cecja 6y ago
There is holocaust denying, calls to kill blacks and rape fantasies about female politicians and movie stars. There are literal calls for the rise of the white race to eradicate everyone else on the front page of gab daily. If you want to defend shit like this on the merit of free speech the probability that you are in fact a white nationalist are not to far. And the history is plastered with censorship the world was never more free than it is now you are just repeating non facts without even doing a hint of research.
dTal 6y ago
Ah, the delicious irony of attacking certain types of speech and ideas as "attacks on speech and ideas". What they are doing and what you are doing are no different; it's all just politics. There's not even anything new about what's happening today. How do you think people's minds were changed on all those "controversial" topics you cite? A whole lot of social pressure. You don't get to make lofty statements about free speech, and then turn around and grumble that other people's speech somehow isn't "playing fair".

gruez 6y ago

>but a purpose-built platform for conspiracies and hate speech Can you elaborate on this?

simias 6y ago
https://gab.com/ https://gab.com/ Just decide for yourself. Literally the first post I get at the moment comes from "QAnon and the Great Awakening" and is in support of that right-wing vigilante shooter in Kenosha, calling the district attorney who's prosecuting him "evil". The next few posts I see mention either "arresting the dems", some anti-vax stuff and so many crypto-fascist dogwhistles that I'm getting tinnitus. If you need more proof I'll let you ding into this.
snypher 6y ago
A good start is the Wikipedia page; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network)
- gruez 6y ago
  The line of thinking seems to be: "Gab's target demographic is users that have been banned from the mainstream platforms for hate speech and conspiracies. Therefore by targeting those users, it's 'purpose built' for hate speech and conspiracies.". My question is, can't you apply this to basically anything that's "free speech"? The mechanism seems to be that most people are content with the mainstream platforms, and therefore the only people who go for the "free speech" platforms end up being the people who were banned from the mainstream platforms. By that logic, is tor "purpose built" for criminals, since basically only people with stuff to hide use it? How is it different than gab?
  - simias 6y ago
    If your site has been overrun by ultra-far-right types for basically its entire existence and you do nothing to mitigate this then you're very clearly complicit. But you're right, most of the "no moderation, anything goes" online communities tend to be overrun by extremists but it's easy to see why: you only need a minority of very dedicated trolls posting outrageous content 24/7 to ruin a community. It takes time and effort to post insightful content and analysis, meanwhile you can throw shit at the walls at a large scale very easily. That's why it's pretty obvious to me that if you want to actually have interesting discussions online and a plurality of opinions you need moderation, otherwise the low effort bullies take over.

oehpr 6y ago

I'm not deeply versed in Gab's history... But lets hypothetically say that Gab was not created for that purpose, but for precisely the purpose it claims it was created for: To be an open platform for free speech, no censorship. Wouldn't it have ended up in the exact same state it is now? Any service that guarantees no censorship is going to have the majority of its userbase be the runoff from other major websites. When voat was created, I 100% believed that they were not attempting to create extremist havens, but their userbase was all the people expelled from reddit for targeted harassment campaigns. I hate this dynamic. We need a way to break this cycle, because right now it's actively killing competitors to existing social networks.

ascorbic 6y ago
If they didn't intend it, they were being incredibly naive. If your defining characteristic is that you don't censor things that are banned on Reddit, then your site is only attractive to people who want to do things banned on Reddit.
- sipos 6y ago
  It wasn't just Reddit they were fleeing. I think it was Twitter too...
  - FalconSensei 6y ago
    yes. So again... Reddit and Twitter are already a cesspool of hate. If you are bad enough to be banned there...
sipos 6y ago
Wikipedia cites a articles that show a number of examples of the company Twitter acocunt saying anti-semetic things, for example https://web.archive.org/web/20181031162843/https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/30/tech/gab-anti-semitic-speech-invs/ https://web.archive.org/web/20181031162843/https://www.cnn.c.... I agree with your point - it is hard to tell the difference generally, and it is an important point to remember, but the behaviour of the company itself shows that it is not an issue this time.

centimeter 6y ago

I follow comedians on there that got banned from twitter because they said a bad word.

G4E 6y ago

A reminder that Fdroid allows you to run your own repo and host there whatever you choose, controversial or not. Fdroid banned this particuliar app (and maybe others, that's not the point) from their own official repo.

blahblahblogger 6y ago

From my perspective we still need other information, do they also ban other apps that are purpose-built for hate speech? Was it just this app because of the controversy over banned Twitter users going to it? I'm not taking a side either way but am curious.

csomar 6y ago

Isn't that why F-Droid was created for in the first place?

renewiltord 6y ago

Okay come on. This sequence of comments is funny, you have to admit. "Google is censoring apps" "It's because those apps can access hate speech" "You can use this other app store" "They ban this app, though" "But that's because it's for hate speech" Come on, this is peak comedy.

Carioca 6y ago
> those apps can access hate speech > it's for hate speech There's a big difference here and you seem to know it
- mav3rick 6y ago
  Yes, as soon as the narrative went against HNs own point the discussion stopped.

young_unixer 6y ago

> but a purpose-built platform for conspiracies and hate speech. That's just false.

ManlyBread 6y ago

And?