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From the very richest Forbes Magazine (reprint) come news of a nefarious plot:
There's no better example of the power, and the terror, inspired by blockchain than Gab.com, the social network used by the accused Pittsburgh synagogue gunman to threaten Jews.
About a month and a half before the alleged gunman made good on those threats by opening fire in a Pittsburgh synagogue and killing 11 people, Gab submitted paperwork to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to raise $10 million via an initial coin offering (ICO). The offering, dated September 18, 2018, has so far received commitments to raise $5.6 million in capital for the "free speech" social network, which is a favorite of white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other members of the "alt-right."
Since the shooting on Saturday, Gab has been shut down by a host of mainstream services including payment processors Stripe and Paypal, Web-hosting company Joyent and briefly, domain registry GoDaddy. But that might not matter, because Gab has already taken the first step toward freeing itself from dependence on traditional infrastructure and support mechanisms, thanks to its funding via the ethereum blockchain. Ultimately Gab's goal is to build an entire ecosystem beyond the reach of centralized authorities—whether Facebook, Twitter or venture capitalists—making it nearly indestructible. On this, the tenth anniversary of the publication of Satoshi Nakamoto's whitepaper, which gave birth to bitcoin, Gab epitomizes the darker consequences of his vision.
[...] Gab can also use other blockchain services if mainstream providers try to kick it off the internet by refusing to provide critical services. If Gab needs to replace GoDaddy for domain service (the addresses people use to find websites), Ethereum Name Service provides domains for decentralized applications built on the ethereum blockchain. Web hosting? No problem. Ethereum's Substratum provides a decentralized alternative to Joyent. Others have already pioneered the idea. PeepEth is a nascent ethereum-powered social network, and Mastadon is a blockchain-based Twitter.
Previously: Social Media and the Pittsburgh Shooter: Gab.com Going Down
(Score: 5, Insightful) by sigterm on Friday November 02 2018, @11:32AM (21 children)
>Gab.com, the social network used by the accused Pittsburgh
>synagogue gunman to threaten Jews.
Yes, a crazy anti-semite and fanatical Donald Trump-hater said something bad on a social network before committing a horrible crime. This obviously means that the social network is to blame.
We should stay clear of platforms like Gab, which had the audacity to not censor anyone and instead leave it up to law enforcement to investigate and prosecute illegal activities.
Instead, we should flock to Twitter and Facebook, networks that censor and remove accounts when people post frog memes or mock left-wing ideologies, while still hosting accounts belonging to IS and Hamas supporters, revolutionaries that openly advocate for violence, black supremacists that in some cases are also rabid anti-semites, and all sorts of ideologues that post racist tweets and messages all day long.
But don't let the fact that just about every single one of the crazies that have committed horrible acts of violence had a Facebook and/or Twitter account derail this conversation. Gab is what we should be focusing on here, because reasons.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Friday November 02 2018, @11:46AM (10 children)
The author clearly does not like Gab, but I don't see how you can avoid mentioning the Pittsburgh shooter given that the site was taken down for that reason.
In an alternate universe where there was no massacre in Pittsburgh, could Gab have stayed online (uninterrupted and not deplatformed) for years to come, without any infrastructure changes? Maybe, maybe not.
The article does look at some of the technologies that could be used to make Gab or a similar platform decentralized and resistant to external attack. We could use such platforms regardless of whether they are called Gab or are havens to the alt-right. As our WSWSWSWSWSWSwswsSWSw poster likes to remind us, the left can get kicked off of Facebook too [soylentnews.org].
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @12:34PM (3 children)
Gab was already in the crosshairs of the Left.
All this censorship and purging was already in high gear on the Internet. This was just their excuse.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Friday November 02 2018, @02:38PM (2 children)
I feel that it might be necessary to clarify for some people: Gab EXISTS because many, or even most, of it's members were already censored and silenced by the CTRL-Left.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @04:41PM (1 child)
Gab's users were kicked off of Twitter, a company run by someone sympathetic to the toxic-right.
They weren't silenced or censored. They were kicked off of a free service for being assholes.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @05:17PM
Why bother? These loons see an imaginary Leftist boogey man coming for them and so they cozy right on up to the actual IRL boogey men who advocate genocide and hate.
I mean what else can be said? Either they are knowingly complicit and are too cowardly to say "yeah I'm racist what of it?" or they are dumb enough to let the propaganda skew their thinking to insane degrees. I'm guessing most are a mix of both.
There are alternatives to Gab, why flock there?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday November 02 2018, @01:13PM
The general idea of making freedom technologically bulletproof is a good direction for people to apply their skills. Now we need to figure out the physical network side of the equation. Mesh networks are an attempt, but the drawbacks remain.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @04:50PM (1 child)
"Deplatformed"?! You can fuck right off with that stupid shit.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday November 02 2018, @05:48PM
What's wrong with that? Was I supposed to use "no-platformed"?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @06:15PM (2 children)
Someone asked weev about gab. He said that sites like this are shit not because of deplatforming
Weev said that the content is shit and the people running it can't build communities
Go cry some more pussy
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Friday November 02 2018, @06:54PM
The Southern Poverty Law Center says weev is bad. What's your hot take on this?
Did GoDaddy, Stripe, and other companies deplatform Gab for those reasons? No, it took a mass shooting and fear of bad publicity to take down Gab. Otherwise, Gab would still be running today, regardless of whether the content was shit.
A real problem is that the top social media platforms like Facebook/Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter get most of the attention. Dailymotion, Vimeo, etc. get ignored because the action and attention is at YouTube. Yet those sites still manage to exist. The alt-right niche of Gab may have hurt its growth, but it was still around.
You sure you're replying to the right comment? I don't care about Gab. It was an imperfect platform because it was able to be taken down like this. Something more like Diaspora or Freenet would be a better idea than Gab. But it still has to gain a lot of users for it to become useful.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 03 2018, @02:50AM
What's a "weev"?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @12:26PM (9 children)
Um, no. But the site clearly embraces hate speech (just look at the content and users they promote when you visit the site).
The Pittsburgh shooter is not the only extremist on Gab. In fact, based on the few hours I spent reviewing posts on Gab last Saturday, it is safe to say the Pittsburgh shooter is nowhere near the right edge of the bell curve of posters.
It's funny, but some of the same "don't censor us! free speech!" proponents of sites like Gab want content from people they label as terroists removed from the internet.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @01:09PM (8 children)
Hilarious isn't it? Imagine if alwaleed bin talal were a major Twitter shareholder and the same standard were applied to Islamist groups on Twitter. Imagine if the lefts "anti-zionism" were investigated [bbc.co.uk] under "hate speech" laws these dipshits pushed for. Incitement, credible threats and defamation were already legally actionable. There is no "hate speech" and if there were Sarah Jeong, Don the Lemon and by extension their employers would need to be shut down (Goodbye NYT & CNN).
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @02:30PM (7 children)
That's a bit of a reach, but you keep trying.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @04:55PM (6 children)
Awkward [twitter.com] and you can give yourself the reach around.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @05:21PM (5 children)
Why is every single citation soooo bad when you types try and point out "both sides!!!"
There is a massive difference between supporting hate speech and mistakenly putting up a trending topic. Twitter apologized, think you'll get Gab to apologize for hosting literal Nazis?
You tools repeatedly show your stupidity, it is no surprise you get mocked for it all the time. There must be some connection between stupidity and racism. Makes sense to me, only stupid people can be so scared of other normal human beings.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @05:38PM (3 children)
Context matters now does it? [youtube.com]
Where did Twitter apologize for hosting Islamists and left wing
anti-zionistsanti-semites?Must be; ridiculous insults and double standards too!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @06:00PM (2 children)
Well, if you don't like it why don't you go post on Gab? What, they were given the boot by their service providers for being so vile that corporate America didn't even want their money? Wow ... looks like an invisible backhand from the market.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @09:02PM (1 child)
May do, free speech is preferable to cynically monetizing extremism. [theintercept.com] Or by the standard of guilt by association, UK Labour [wikipedia.org] hamas and Farrakhan hosting Twitter must also be corporately deplatformed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @11:25PM
Deplatform, deplane, degauss ... just don't delay my lunch.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @06:52PM
Do you consider identity to be a connection? This is why we can't have white supremacy! White people are too dumb! Especially the ones who are so dumb they think they are superior! Dunning-Kroeger iin overdrive, so to speak. Too stupid to recognize how stupid they are, to the point they take that as a sign of smartness!