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bradley13 [soylentnews.org] writes:

The social network gab.com is apparently going down on Monday, October 29th at 09:00 ET. [twitter.com] Their ISP has terminated their services, ostensibly because the Robert Bowers, the Pittsburgh shooter, 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.

What is...interesting: the shooter had other social media accounts, on which he also spouted some fairly disturbed rantings. Here, for example, someone has saved some of Robert Bowers' posts on Twitter, [twitter.com] taken before his Twitter account disappeared. So why is Gab being taken down, but not Twitter?

If you want free speech, you apparently don't want to be in the US.

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