The social media platform apparently favored by alleged Tree of Life gunman Robert Bowers is touting a strong finish to the year.
Gab.com, a site that has become one of the poles in a sharp debate over the boundaries of free speech, said Monday that it is “finishing off 2018 with 856,000 Gab community members.”
Yet, Gab, founded in 2016, hasn’t escaped 2018 without scrutiny, and its new domain registrar, the Seattle-based Epik, is ending the year under investigation from the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office.
Users laud the platform as a place where they can speak freely, beyond the confines of Twitter’s “Hateful conduct policy” or Facebook’s community standards -- both of which attempt to police hateful imagery and attacks against religion, sexual orientation or race.
A New Year’s Eve scroll through the Gab.com “popular posts” feed reveals a Y2K reference, a cartoon parody of Auld Lang Syne -- “May old Pelosi be forgot…” -- and a few other jokes. But scroll a little further and a photo of a fair-skinned woman in traditional German dress pops up, and a Gab user laments the supposed loss of the German race. A thread of anti-Semitic comments follows.
Company figures show an uptick in users through the summer and fall of 2018.
The numbers pale in comparison to the billions signed onto the Silicon Valley giants. However, the spotlight turned on Gab because on Oct. 27, just before Mr. Bowers entered the Squirrel Hill synagogue and allegedly killed 11 and injured six, he posted on Gab.com, “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. ... I’m going in.”
Mr. Bowers is charged with 29 federal hate crime counts, plus state homicide and ethnic intimidation charges.
That morning’s post followed other anti-Semitic messages that Mr. Bowers apparently made public on the platform under the handle @onedingo.
One post in the days leading up to the shooting read, “Daily Reminder: Diversity means chasing down the last white person.”
Two days after the mass shooting in Squirrel Hill, domain provider GoDaddy terminated its service for Gab. The social media site’s founder Andrew Torba remained defiant, posting the site was “not going anywhere.”
By Nov. 3, Epik agreed to register Gab’s domain. In a blog post, Epik CEO and founder Robert Monster decried the “de-platforming” of the site by GoDaddy and championed the idea of perpetual domain registration.
Mr. Monster is described on Epik’s other blog posts as a “digital rights activist” and a member of the stakeholder group for the global domain registrar regulator ICANN.
Just days after Epik took on Gab, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro subpoenaed the domain registrar, demanding documents describing Epik's relationship with the social media site and seeking any complaints Epik has received about Gab. The subpoena indicated that it is part of "an ongoing civil investigation" and did not mention Mr. Bowers.
The office would not comment Monday on the ongoing investigation; Epik could not be reached for comment.
The Southern Poverty Law Center on Monday characterized Gab as a place online where people are being “radicalized aggressively.”
“We’ve been watching Gab since ... right after Charlottesville because a lot of extremists who we follow were kicked off [mainstream social media sites] and went to Gab,” said Heidi Beirich, director of the intelligence project at the center. “Because there’s 800,000 users, it’s a big undertaking. It is the number one place nowadays where white supremacists gather.”
Joel Finkelstein, director of Network Contagion Research Institute, which uses computer tools to “expose hate” on social media, said anti-Semitism has been prominent on the site.
“In general there was a spike in Jew-related comments [on Gab.com] before the event occurred,” he said, referring to the synagogue shooting.
In an email from Gab’s legal team, a representative said Gab is “not a free-for-all where ‘anything goes.’"
“Gab's rules and U.S. law are specific: they protect speech which is protected by the First Amendment. Where someone crosses the line into threats or illegal activity and this is brought to our attention, either by our users or by law enforcement, we act quickly. For legal reasons we're unable to publicize when and how we respond in such instances,” the representative wrote.
The representative would not comment on the investigation into Epik.
However, Ms. Beirich said the standard used by Gab to determine what constitutes a threat is “intensely narrow.”
Gab does ban a user “occasionally,” she said, mentioning the 2017 banning of extremist Andrew Auernheimer.
On Monday, Gab posted a flurry of tweets criticizing the Southern Poverty Law Center and commenting on the First Amendment.
One read: “Daily reminder: if you have domains on GoDaddy or anywhere else you are rolling the dice with businesses that do not support free speech.”
Ashley Murray: 412-263-1750, amurray@post-gazette.com or on Twitter at @Ashley__Murray
First Published: December 31, 2018, 10:38 p.m.
