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

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: 3, Informative) by nobu_the_bard on Monday October 29 2018, @12:31PM (1 child)

    by nobu_the_bard (6373) on Monday October 29 2018, @12:31PM (#755046)

    Gab is presumably easier to cut off. Facebook and Twitter are presumably not contained in a single data center behind a single ISP.

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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday October 29 2018, @04:20PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Monday October 29 2018, @04:20PM (#755166)

    I would be surprised to learn that Facebook isn't its own ISP.
    But if anybody decides to cut off Twitter over the raving posts of some dangerous lunatic, I'm not gonna shed a tear at the loss.