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As has been noted, much of the world has declared war on right, Republican, or conservative viewpoints. We've followed GAB's evolution off and on, here on SN. It would appear that, having overcome multiple obstacles in the past, GAB is under attack from a new angle.
This is the email from GAB:
At 8:38pm on Wednesday December 9th Gab received an email from Walden Macht & Haran LLP notifying us of a Gab account, @EnemiesOfThePeople, that was in breach of our Terms of Service.
The Gab account was created just a few days ago and featured the personal addresses, photos, and more of election and government officials, which is against our terms of service. The account also made direct threats of violence towards these individuals, which is against the law as well as our terms of service.
This type of content has no place on Gab and we have a longstanding history of zero tolerance for illegal behavior. At Gab we believe that free speech and open discussion are the best ways to solve problems and disagreements, not violence.
Within minutes of receiving the email alerting us to the existence of this account we took immediate action by backing up the account information for law enforcement and then terminating the account from our service.
We took it one step further by alerting the Gab community to this behavior and noted that our community members should report this type of illegal activity to our moderation team immediately if they come across it.
At 9:34pm, less than an hour after being alerted to the existence of this account, our attorney replied to Walden Macht & Haran LLP to let them know that we took immediate action to terminate the account.
At 3:49pm Thursday afternoon Reuters published an article covering this story and neglected to reach out to Gab for comment before publication. In the story Reuters falsely claimed that the account remained active on Gab even though it had been suspended within minutes of it being brought to our attention the night before.
We have since sent the following retraction request to the editor of Reuters as well as the three “journalists” on the story. We believe it’s important to transparently lay out the order of events here to highlight how “journalists” recklessly print whatever they want without fact checking or asking the subject of a story for comment on the matter at hand.
Click here to read our full email exchange with Reuters.
Please also share it so other people can learn how the legacy media vipers operate.
Reuter's article on the "enemies of the people" "enemies of the nation" and associated accounts.
https://news.gab.com/2020/12/10/gabs-statement-on-the-website-targeting-u-s-election-officials/
That link reiterates most of the contents of the email I received, along with a chain of emails with Reuters.
https://gab.com/a/posts/105353449973018161
An appeal from Torba for GAB members to be on the lookout for other accounts that violate the law, and violate TOS.
https://gab.com/enemiesofthenation
It appears that the account "enemiesofthenation" still exists on the servers, but the content is obscured. I have little idea what that means for legal purposes.
Having missed the opportunity to view the content published by "enemies of the people", I can't make a judgement on how bad it is. Obviously, it was bad enough that Torba felt he was obligated to take it down.
Waiting to see who, besides Reuters, goes on the attack over this incident.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11 2020, @11:45PM
Reuters has no way to verify whether it's possible for Gab accounts to post content or for their owners to login to those accounts. If a page associated with the terminated account remains active on Gab's server, it's easy to see why Reuters would believe the account is still active.
There are at least three main reasons why Republicans are getting so much backlash:
1) A large portion of the arguments made for supposedly conservative positions are based on misinformation that goes well beyond the minor error in Reuters' article. This includes anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, claiming COVID isn't that serious, saying AGW is a hoax, alleging significant election fraud, and so many other things. The misinformation frequently supports racism, such as false statements that immigrants are a threat to security or that Black Lives Matter is a terrorist or a communist organization. Simply put, the difference between the right and left, generally speaking, is not a good faith disagreement on policy.
2) Trump's legal challenges have no merit in fact or law. Despite this, it should be noted that Trump and his lawyers are trying to disenfranchise voters in several states and overturn the will of the people in a legitimate, free, and fair election. It should be no surprise that an assault on democratic processes is received unfavorably.
3) There are many people in power who know better, who know that Trump's legal challenges and Twitter screeds are without merit, but support Trump's efforts anyway. This includes the 19 state attorneys general and the 100+ Republicans in Congress who have gone on record to support the baseless lawsuit that is currently before the Supreme Court. All of these people know better, yet they go beyond even passively enabling Trump and are taking action to support his actions.
Actual conservatives are being driven away from the Republican party because of all of the misinformation and the extreme positions being supported by the party. Reagan-era conservatives do not fit within today's Republican party. This is not a backlash against limited government, individual responsibility, and conservative positions. It is a backlash against misinformation, extremist positions, and efforts to undermine democracy. It's incredibly hypocritical to complain about a minor issue with a Reuters article while the far right is spreading far more egregious misinformation on a much larger scale.