The Gab Purge

I’ve been a strong supporter of Gab.

I also remain a strong supporter. I would be lying though if I said that I wasn’t concerned over what happened this past weekend. I’m not referring to the shutdown, which lasted a week, or all the technical glitches which have since been sorted out. The site appears to be functioning normally now.

The thing that worries me is that hundreds of accounts were recently purged. This is a sharp increase from the two high profile bannings of Weev and Paul Nehlen over the past two years. I can’t say that I am surprised that some of the edge posters were banned given that flirting with violent rhetoric, even if it is perfectly legal and falls under Brandenburg v. Ohio, is such a massive liability. No one wants to deal with the massive hassle of being deplatformed by their registrar and hosting company.

If you are posting violent rhetoric on the internet, you are making a mistake. Full stop.

1.) First, you are attracting the attention of law enforcement agencies who monitor these things, and everything you say is going into a database somewhere to be used against you.

2.) Second, you are a liability to everyone around you, even those who are unaware of what you are saying. Just look at how much trouble has been caused by random edgelords shitposting on Discord.

3.) Third, it is idiotic to talk about violence on the internet. I mean … like, you are literally leaving a paper trail which can be used by all of your enemies to harm you. It is damaging enough to be associated with taboo ideas without being associated with violence on top of it.

There are other reasons that I could get into as to why this is dumb. It is such a bad idea that I even posted a big warning for future reference about it in the sidebar tonight.

Every single time one of these mass shootings happens there is always a rush by fake news journalists to blame it on sites like this one. Virtually no one supports mass shootings or sees it as anything but a big self own but you know how these things go in our current political climate. There is nothing Donald Trump can do about it either. He is blamed by the media every time it happens too.

So, I completely understand where Andrew Torba is coming from on violent rhetoric, as I don’t want it here either. I run a nationalist website though, not a free speech site. I also get the sense that the recent purge may have been broader than a handful of edge posters memeing about Robert Bowers. No one is mourning the loss of Michael Edison Hayden, but what did accounts like frogwave do to get purged? Who went down and for what reason in the big purge?

Anyway, I guess you could say that I am getting social media fatigue. I don’t see the point in investing so much time and energy in building up accounts only to have your horse shot out from under you. It happened again to Mike Enoch on Twitter last night after the Blue Wave failed to materialize. This is why I never bothered to try to seriously return to Twitter and focused my attention elsewhere.

I’m going to spend more time writing here this winter. I will still be posting on Gab, but I want to take a step back for now and see what comes of all this pressure. It is warm and cozy here. Quite honestly, we needed to spend more time building up our own platform rather than shitposting all day anyway, and the timeout has had a positive impact in that we are writing more articles.