LarrySanger.org

So I tried out Gab.ai

After the recent purges of Alex Jones and assorted conservatives and libertarians by Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and others, I decided it really is time for me to learn more about other social networks that are more committed to free speech. I decided to try Gab.ai, hoping against hope that it wouldn’t prove to be quite as racist as it is reputed to be.

See, while I love freedom of speech and will strongly defend the right of free speech—sure, even of racists and Nazis, even of Antifa and Communists—I don’t want to hang out in a community dominated by actual open racists and Nazis. How boring.

So I went to the website, and, well, Gab.ai certainly does have a lot of people who are at least pretending to be Nazis. I never would have guessed there were that many Nazis online.

To support my impression, I posted a poll:

Are you OK with all the open racism and anti-Semitism on Gab.ai? 57% Yes. 37% I tolerate it. 6% Makes me want to leave.

Wow! 1,368 votes! I sure hit a nerve with Gab.ai. But the results, well, they were disappointing: 57% of self-selected poll answerers on the web poll said they were OK with open racism on Gab.ai, 37% tolerated it, and it made 6% of them want to leave. But I was told by several people that I should have added another option: “That’s what the Mute button is for.”

There’s another reason I’ve spent this much time exploring the site. It’s that I really doubt there are that many actual Nazis on the site. Consider for a moment:

  1. The Establishment is increasingly desperate to silence dissenting voices.
  2. Gab.ai and some other alternative media sites have been getting more popular.
  3. Silicon Valley executives know the fate of MySpace and Yahoo: it’s possible for giants to be replaced. Users are fickle.
  4. Like progressives, most conservatives aren’t actually racist, and they will be put off by communities dominated by open, in-your-face racists.
  5. There’s a midterm election coming up and people spending untold millions to influence social media, since that, we are now told, is where it’s at.

Considering all that, it stands to reason that lots of left-wing trolls are being paid (or happily volunteer; but no doubt many are paid) to flood Gab.ai and make appallingly racist, fascist, anti-Semitic accounts. Of course they are; it’s an obvious strategy. The only question is how many—i.e., what percentage of the Gab.ai users—consist of such faux racists.

Such trolls aside, there are at least two broad categories of people on Gab.ai. In one category there are the bona fide racists, Nazis, anti-Semites, and other such miscreants, and in the other category there is everyone else—mostly conservatives, libertarians, and Trump voters who do things like share videos of (black conservative) Candace Owens and shill for Trump (I voted for Gary Johnson, and I’ve always been bored by political hackery). The latter category of user mutes those of the former category, apparently.

So, feeling desperate for an alternative to Twitter, I spent a few hours today on the site, mostly muting racists, and a bit of getting introduced to some people who assured me that most of the people on the site were decent and non-racist, and that what you had to do was—especially in the beginning—spend a lot of time doing just what I was doing, muting racists.

Boy, are there a lot of racists (or maybe faux racists) there to mute. I still haven’t gotten to the end of them.

But I’m not giving up on Gab.ai, not yet. Maybe it’ll change, or my experience will get better. A lot of people there assured me that it would. I love that it’s as committed to free speech as it is, and I wouldn’t want to censor all those racists and Nazis just as I wouldn’t want to censor Antifa and Communists. Keep America weird, I say!

If it’s not Gab.ai, I do think some other network will rise. Two others I need to spend more time on are Steemit.com, a blockchain blogging website, similar to Medium and closely associated with EOS and Block.one, and Mastodon.social, which is sort of a cross between Twitter and Facebook. Steemit has become pretty popular (more so than Gab.ai), while Mastodon has unfortunately been struggling. I also want to spend more time on BitChute, a growing and reasonably popular YouTube competitor.

by

Larry Sanger

“Internet Knowledge Organizer.” Currently President of the Knowledge Standards Foundation, started Wikipedia and various other educational and reference sites. Ph.D., Philosophy, Ohio State, 2000. [read more]

Posted

in

, ,

Comments

Please do dive in (politely). I want your reactions!

37 responses to “So I tried out Gab.ai”

  1. DJ

    Broadcast based social media is a cancer, the right choice isn’t to switch to a new social media, it is to turn off sites that follow the models of Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.

    If you really want to interact, find small boards with people who are accountable as individual members in much the same way an individual in real life is accountable. Though, really, aren’t there people in real life you would rather talk to?

    I get the need for a certain amount of social media presence, but that is best limited to a work-safe account on the major platforms through which you share the minimum required amount of apolitical and non-religious information to maintain your presence in your community.

    Sorry to say, but by jumping to Gab you’re just exchanging one form of cancer for another.

    Reply
    1. Larry Sanger

      Well, I didn’t jump to Gab. I tried it out. I’ve also tried out Mastodon and some others.

      I’m already a semi-public person and on the record as a libertarian, and I want to defend rights to free speech and privacy. I suppose we all use social media slightly differently. That’s OK. What’s not OK in any case is that we don’t fully own our own data, and that it’s centralized in the hands of a very few corporations.

      Reply
  2. Joe

    Any poster commenter in a forum or social site who does not have a real photo or profile who post racist nazi bs should not be taken seriously. It should be a rule for every reader viewer on any site. One they’re a coward or just fake race hoaxers etc.

    Reply
  3. Clairvaux

    One should make it a principle never to use again the word racist or racism. It has no meaning anymore. It’s just a political slander term.

    I would like to convince you of that with a very simple experiment. Write down 10 different meanings of the word racist, as it is actually used by people.

    The important thing here is, it must not be your definition of racism. It must be all definitions of racism that are often used in the real world. Make those definitions as precise as possible. When some people say x is racist, they mean x […].

    Then, take all 10 definitions, and sort them from less racist to more racist.

    Included in there will probably be your own definition of racism, but that’s a minor point.

    If you have done the experiment honestly, I guarantee you that in number 10 you’ll have something like : promote an ideology where all members of an alien race are deemed to be subhumans, and proceed to mass murder them.

    And that in number 1, you’ll have something like : more frequently congregate with members of your own race then with members of other races.

    Whereas number 2 to 9 will run the whole gamut in-between.

    So in number 10, we have something that exceedingly few people in the world do, that is universally punished by close to 100 % of law systems across the world, and that most nations, cultures, religions and creeds morally condemn in the harshest manner.

    And in number 1, we have something that is mostly legal in most countries, that all men of all nations, cultures, religions and creeds do all the time, and which is even deemed a good and moral thing to do by most of them.

    I would posit that a word which is actually used to describe acts that are so different, indeed completely opposite, has no actual meaning and should not be part of the vocabulary. Especially when the result of being called a racist can be social death or prison.

    That word serves only one purpose : insulting others and informing the world I’m a good guy.

    Reply
  4. Thomas Stratford

    Torba is a World class idiot. The platform is a useless POS!

    Reply
Older Comments
1 2

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Log in