The founder of Gab.com said activity on the social network, criticized as a far-right haven, has soared because of users riled by censorship on larger Silicon Valley platforms.
Gab, which was launched by Andrew Torba in 2016 as an alternative to Twitter, has more than 1 million users worldwide and has seen record traffic over the past two weeks, Torba told the Washington Examiner. Twitter, by contrast, has 110 million users a day, while Facebook has 1.6 billion.
Gab is adding “thousands of new users” each day, Torba added, an uptick that comes as lesser-known social media sites including 8chan, an online message board, have come under increasing scrutiny for hosting extremist and hateful content. The platforms cast themselves as sites where free speech can flourish and conservative viewpoints are free from censorship, but they have been accused of serving as the favored sites for white nationalists.
Among Gab’s active users was Robert Bowers, the man charged with killing 11 people in a shooting spree last year at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and linked to a threat to the Jewish community on the platform beforehand. Authorities are trying to determine conclusively whether Patrick Crusius, arrested in the killings of 22 people and injuries to 24 more in El Paso, Texas, uploaded an anti-immigrant manifesto to 8chan before that attack.
On Sunday, 8chan’s network service provider Cloudflare terminated its internet services.
While Torba said Gab’s “growth and site activity has never been stronger,” he doesn’t believe its success is tied to 8chan being offline. Rather, he attributes it to a recent redesign of Gab.com and “the fact that users are getting fed up with being treated like children by Silicon Valley giants.”
Companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google have been working to identify and remove harmful content from their platforms amid growing pressure from lawmakers, particularly Democrats. Those efforts, however, have led conservative lawmakers and President Trump, who boasts a Twitter following of 62 million, to accuse the sites of censoring Republicans and demonstrating an anti-conservative bias.
On Wednesday, Twitter locked an account belonging to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s reelection campaign after it posted a video of protesters outside McConnell’s home in Kentucky.
The move by Twitter prompted Eric Trump, the president’s son, to declare the site “an absolute mess”; he then followed Gab on Twitter.
