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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 (12 children)
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.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2020, @12:07AM (2 children)
Why the hell has this comment been moderated "Troll"? What's the matter, little runaway? Don't like people messing with your narrative again?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday December 12 2020, @12:23AM (1 child)
It gets another +1 from me for that exact reason.
Fox News and company did to Runaway what his generation was convinced Mortal Kombat would do to my generation. Only worse. We are watching a grown-ass retirement-age man go completely toucan-shagging Froot-Loops insane.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2020, @12:57AM
#MeToo! Poor Conservative snowflakes, melting in a Gab, after advocating violence over Parle?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2020, @01:10AM
If the mainstream media was quoting your post it would read:
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2020, @01:57AM (3 children)
If the shoe were on the other foot, you'd feel differently. You have no moral compass.
We're supposed to believe that elections were stolen in 2000, 2004, and 2016. It was all totally legitimate in 2008, 2012, and 2020. In those years, the legal challenges have no merit in fact or law.
Hey, I think I see a pattern.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2020, @03:34AM (2 children)
The 2000 election was decided by a single state, Florida, with a margin of a few hundred votes. The delay in deciding the outcome was due to hand recounts on the basis of known issues with the punch card system and verifying the extremely narrow margin. The recount was brought to a halt by a somewhat controversial decision from the Supreme Court, unlike the unanimous rejections of Trump's lawsuits. Bush won the electoral vote but not the popular vote. There were no allegations of massive fraud and the result hinged on a single state with a far closer margin than any state that Trump is contesting. If there is an objection to the fairness of this election, it is only in the halting of the recount in Florida.
There were concerns about possible irregularities in the election but Kerry didn't contest this election. Arguing that this is somehow equivalent to 2020 is incredibly dishonest. As for 2016, Trump lost the popular vote. There were allegations that his campaign colluded with Russia. However, there were no attempts to overturn the outcome of the election. Trump was investigated, yes, but Mueller's investigation was overseen by Trump's justice department. The impeachment happened because of Trump's actions after becoming president and Republicans ran a sham trial and refused to call even a single witness.
At no point were there efforts to invalidate hundreds of thousands of votes. At no point were absurd conspiracy theories concocted without a shred of evidence to support them. If you're arguing there's some kind of equivalency between issues between those elections and 2020, you're a liar. You knew better but you posted that lie anyway. The level of misinformation, absurd conspiracy theories, and malicious lawsuits is unprecedented in the United States.
It's not surprising that 126 House Republicans betrayed their country by placing their loyalty to Trump ahead of their oath to the Constitution. Most of the Republicans in Congress do not care about the rule of law. If Republicans did care about the rule of law, they would have taken the impeachment of Trump seriously. Trump was impeached for a quid pro quo, effectively attempting to bribe Ukraine's president to smear Joe Biden. There was considerable evidence against Trump, unlike the baseless conspiracy theories in the election lawsuits, but Republicans refused to hear it and rejected having witnesses at the Senate trial.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2020, @06:09AM (1 child)
Not quite true on the 2000 election. The initial recounts were fine, and followed, by black-letter law. The margin was verified, give or take the usual statistical blips in counting.
What was stopped was a newly invented recount, that a friendly judge was persuaded to order, that was in contravention of the law.
The supremes just said that a judge couldn't rewrite election law, so stop wasting time breaking the law.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2020, @09:09AM
Sort of. The basis for recounting undervotes and overvotes was valid. If the voter's intent can be clearly determined, Florida law indicated the votes should count even if the scanning machines did not count them. The primary issue with the recounts was not that they were occurring but that they were only conducted in a few counties instead of statewide. The Supreme Court ruled that the different standards for counting votes between counties violated the equal protection clause. Analysis of the votes after the election suggests that a statewide recount following a uniform standard for overvotes and undervotes probably would have resulted in Gore winning by under 1,000 votes.
I should also point out that Bush gained an estimated 486 votes and Gore gained an estimated 194 votes from overseas absentee votes that were illegal for issues like arriving late or lacking a signature. This benefited Bush but was done on the basis of votes that the Trump campaign would fight to exclude. I don't have a problem with this, just noting that this benefited Republicans back in 2000.
Gore had a real path to victory by contesting the election. Trump does not. The 2000 election outcome depended on swinging one state, Florida. Overvotes and undervotes accounted for 3% of the ballots in Florida. Bush won Florida by 537 votes in the final tally, or roughly 0.01% of the vote. The Gore campaign argued that any of the 3% of uncounted votes that were valid under Florida law should be counted and could very plausibly tip the election in Gore's favor. The Bush campaign argued that it violated the equal protection clause to apply different standards for recounting votes from one county to the next, something that also seems intuitively unfair. Both campaigns had very valid arguments, which contrasts with the nonsense and conspiracy theories from the Trump campaign.
(Score: 2, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday December 12 2020, @03:18AM (2 children)
Simply asking is too obvious for you then? Watching to see if anything new is posted from the account couldn't possibly work? Yeah, there's no conceivable way they could find out if the account was active.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2020, @03:44AM (1 child)
You know better than to lie like that. You're an admin of SoylentNews. You have full access to quietly change the password and email address for a user account, effectively banning them without deleting the account. You know full well that to an ordinary user, they would have no way of distinguishing whether the absence of posts from an account means the account has been disabled or the user simply has chosen not to log in. You knew better than to post that nonsense. Lying like you did is just shameful because you of all people know better.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday December 12 2020, @03:50AM
Which is why I'm fairly confident that I would have the knowledge to say "yes" authoritatively if anyone asked me if someone had been banned or not. I expect the Gab admins are at least competent enough to answer correctly best two out of three.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2020, @07:28AM
https://fee.org/articles/is-black-lives-matter-marxist-no-and-yes/ [fee.org]