SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
posted by
martyb
on Monday October 29 2018, @08:15AM
from the social-commentary-on-social-media dept.
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.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Social Media and the Pittsburgh Shooter: Gab.com Going Down
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 116 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Hacking's just another word for nothing left to kludge.
(Score: 2) by mobydisk on Monday October 29 2018, @09:37PM (2 children)
The feds should be seething to host this site. Imagine how they would love to have a real-time feed of the IP addresses of potential extremists.
As for those asking why Facebook and Twitter aren't being taken down since he posted his vitriol there too: I think the problem is that gab is perceived as having vitriol as it's only purpose. Kinda like how reddit closes subreddits that are nothing but TOS violations. But if you make those same posts in another subreddit, they won't take down the entire thing. That's not a fair reason of course - but this is political correctness taken to the next level. Nobody wants to be the one to defend free speech any more. It's just too dang politically expensive!
(Score: 2) by mobydisk on Monday October 29 2018, @09:40PM (1 child)
Skimming the Wikpedia article on Gab that is linked in the summary:
OHHH THAT is why they are being singled-out! The CEO basically founded the company as a place for right-wing rants. Had it been started with a more noble goal, they might be perceived differently. Too bad. :-(
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday October 31 2018, @06:13AM
That is what you get for reading Wikipedia on any topic that could possibly be political.
No, Gab's business model is exactly the same as Fox News Channel. Rupert Murdock is not a Conservative, but he IS in the publishing business and was smart enough to look at the US market and realize the existing media was so biased it was leaving a large untapped market, namely about half the country. So he hired on Roger Ailes, who was a Conservative (Reagan campaign) and told him to build a news operation. And because the competition refuses to change FNC now not only dominates CNN and MSNBC's combined viewership, it is often the single most watched channel on cable television entirely.
So Torba saw Big Social tossing users off by the thousand and then accelerating to the hundreds of thousands per month and realized every one of those banned users was an opportunity. Just because FakeBook and Twatter don't want a user doesn't mean they will simply disconnect their PC/phone and stop communicating, they are users ready for the taking. The "Legions of the Damned" were what allowed a new social media outlet with zero venture capital and mostly subscription fees and selling t-shirts and caps to bootstrap up to something everybody is starting to notice and talk about in about twenty six months. According to their twitter feed they have replaced the defective providers and are loading their data. If that happens and they can stay on the air, it is reasonable to expect them to have user counts in the millions next year, perhaps tens of millions. And Torba won't be owned by a vulture capitalist.