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Social Media and the Pittsburgh Shooter: Gab.com Going Down

posted by martyb on Monday October 29 2018, @08:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the social-commentary-on-social-media dept.

bradley13 writes:

The social network gab.com is apparently going down on Monday, October 29th at 09:00 ET. Their ISP has terminated their services, ostensibly because Robert Bowers, the Pittsburgh mass shooting suspect, had made offensive posts on Gab.

To get this out of the way: I have mixed feelings about Gab, more specifically, about the founders. However, the idea that some social network somewhere should refuse to censor anything that is not outright illegal? This is good. Social media has become the modern "market square", and free speech should be guaranteed, even if the platforms are technically private.

If you want free speech, you apparently don't want to be in the U.S.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 30 2018, @05:18AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 30 2018, @05:18AM (#755512)

    You seem to conflate free speech with freedom of consequences from speech. If you spout off crap that has no other purpose other than to promote harm to others, you are going to get smacked down.

    That's a load of bull. The two go hand in hand. By that metric, North Korea is a bastion of free speech, talking bad about Dear Leader has no other purpose than to disrupt the harmonious social fabric that has been perfected by the revolution! Legitimizing violence against people you disagree with defeats the point of having free speech at all, I thought you people were smart.

    No legitimate business today wants to be associated with it, and if a business becomes aware of such activity they are likely going to disassociate themselves from it.

    You think too small, business is apolitical. Money from terrorists, money from moral busybodies, money from government is still money. Are you going to personally inspect every commercially available product to ensure they have never ever associated with undesirables up to the N-th degree?