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

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

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

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

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

The big takeaway is confirmation of 200 permanent bans.

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

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

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

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