Gab (social network)

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Gab (social network)
Gab logo.png
URL https://gab.com
https://gab.ai
Type of site Social network
Registration Required
Available in English
No. of users Roughly 1 Million[1]
Created by Andrew Torba
Ekrem Büyükkaya
Launched August 2016 (beta)
May 2017 (final)
Current status Active


Gab.com is a free-speech alternative to Twitter, Facebook and other social media. It was created by Andrew Torba. Gab allows for free and open conversations regarding any topic without the fear of being banned or censored. It has been slandered as politically far right by several news sites, its competitors and Wikipedia, on which a politically biased article about Gab was written.

Gab experience

Gab's color theme is a minimalist combination of black text on white panels with pink hashtags and usernames. Pro users have a contrasted top bar in dark blue. The interface displays messages in a Twitter-like vertical scroll timeline with an option to upvote each post. The site also aggregates popular posts and trending topic hashtags.[2] Users of the site with a score higher than 250 can downvote posts, but must spend points to do so.

Users can sort comments and posts in a subject by time or score. Default biographies for new users display a randomly chosen quotation about the importance of free speech.[3] Users also have the option to "mute" other users and terms. The default profile picture for new users to the site features NPC Wojak, a meme popular on far-right sites. The site offers its users an option to delete their entire posting history in a single click.

When writing a gab, users can post up to 3,000 characters of plain text, with the first 300 appearing in the timeline along with an option to read the rest.[4]

Dissenter

On 24 February 2019, Gab launched Dissenter, a Chrome extension and website that allows users to comment about any web page using their Gab account. Currently the browser plugin/extension is now available for most popular internet browsers on most popular operating system types. Notably comments can be made on any URL with the Dissenter software, which includes making comments on sites where comments have been: disabled / the site has no comment feature / the user was banned on the site / the site censors certain comments.

Reception

It has been slandered as politically far right by several news sites.[5] Additionally a clearly politically biased article was written about it (Dissenter) on Wikipedia.[6] Andrew Torba commented on the Wikipedia Gab article:

Extremely fake news, highly politicized, anything but objective, and one of the biggest smear campaign articles on all of Wikipedia. The page is also being camped on by a Wikipedia admin, a former Wikimedia employee, and an avowed Communist who refuse to let any form of objective description or lede be allowed on the page. They openly mock free speech and cite radical far-left activists and blogs as their sources. FAKE NEWS. - Andrew Torba on the Wikipedia Gab article

In May 2019 Chadwick Moore in Spectator USA accused journalists of having "launched a smear campaign against Gab as it began to grow in popularity .... obsess[ing] over the fact a man who murdered 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh was a Gab user. This lead Apple and Google to collude in banning the app from their stores". Moore argued that while the percentage of posts containing hate speech on Gab was higher than on Twitter, the total volume of hate-speech posts on Twitter was larger because of its much larger userbase.[7]

References

External links