Front Burner - 'Alt-right' social network Gab's connection to an anti-Semitic massacre

Episode Date: October 30, 2018

Just minutes before one of the deadliest attacks on Jews in America's history, the alleged shooter posted a message to Gab, a social media network known for attracting white nationalists and the alt-right. So, what is Gab, and where does it fit in the big picture of online hate? Slate's tech reporter April Glaser explains.

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about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. It's become an upsetting newsroom routine. Every time there's a mass shooting or act of violence, we turn to the killer's social media to search for clues about what they were thinking and posting in the days, weeks, and months before the killings.

We combed through Facebook after the Toronto van attack. This posting, apparently from Manassian, says the incel rebellion has already begun. We dug through the accused pipe bomber's Twitter. He has negative tweets pretty much for every target. And the same is true in the aftermath of the killing of 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue. A key part of the investigation, of course, is the digital footprint. This time, though, the suspect had been posting on a site called Gab. His latest post, it went up just minutes before police were called.

Gab is a social network that's known for attracting white nationalists and the alt-right. Its founder says the site is dedicated to free speech. Today, what is Gab and where does it fit in to the big picture of online hate? It's kind of become a digital playpen for neo-Nazis and gamer gators and white supremacists and anyone who just is looking for an offensive joke. That's coming up on FrontBurner. I'm April Glazer. I'm a journalist at Slate and I cover technology industry and hate groups online. So Gab was started in 2016 by a man named Andrew Torba in San Mateo, California. But it's a social network that was created after Facebook and Twitter started taking a harder line about hate speech.

line about hate speech, right? And they started kind of kicking people off more and they started monitoring groups and kind of removing groups that were harassing people. And in response to that, Andrew Torba set up his own social media platform that was supposed to be free speech centric, where you can say wherever you want and say whatever you want and you won't get kicked off. What we saw as an opportunity is conservatives, people on the right, Trump supporters specifically, are being shut up, are being censored. So that right there is our first market. And what do we know about Andrew Torba?

Who is he? Sure. Andrew Torba is a programmer. He actually used to be a member of the Y Combinator startup accelerator, which is pretty famous in the Bay Area for kind of incubating very successful startups that turn into big online businesses. He was kicked out of that, though, for violating its harassment policy. He's a big Trump fan. Yeah, he's a big Trump fan, and he's kind of an internet troll, actually. So if the idea in the beginning, at least from

Andrew Torba's perspective or his perspective out loud, is that this was a free speech centered site. Can we talk a little bit about what it actually has become? What kind of conversations are happening on this platform? You know, Gab brands itself as just a radical free expression place or a place where you can say whatever you want. a place where you can say whatever you want. Versus us acting as big brother, big sister, and deciding what users should and should not see as a whole, we give you the individual the tools to shape that experience. But there's obviously an alt-right theme there because it's branded with the face of Pepe the Frog, the kind of anthropomorphic frog that's become emblematic of the alt-right.

So it's free speech, but also clearly has an alt-right tinge. It's turned into a digital playpen for Nazis and white supremacists and men's rights activists and anyone who's kind of like an anti-PC crusader, gamer gators, anti-feminists, free speech absolutists, you know, anyone who loves a solidly offensive joke. Gab is a place where it's safe to be hateful.

It's a place that creates a safe space for people that the rest of us kind of want to be safe from. Does it work like Twitter or like Facebook? How does it work, the logistics of it? Yeah, so you make an account like Twitter or Facebook and you can post a missive or a post that'll go to a feed that your followers will see or that'll go to a public feed that anybody that's on Gab can see. You can start private groups. You can have messages. The more followers you have, the more people will see your posts like Twitter.

It's kind of a mix between Twitter and Facebook in that it has more social networking functions like Facebook, but then it has kind of this like fire hose where everybody's stuff is seen like Twitter. And are you seeing, are there like certain threads that get a lot of fuel? There's communities. So there's people who like to talk about politics and people who like to talk about the recent, you know, whatever the news of the day is.

I mean, it's definitely a place where politics are discussed. But the thing is, is that the politics that are discussed are often with a heavily anti-Semitic or offensive slant, right? So everything is kind of coded with this offensive veneer. What the shooting that just happened, of course, some of the biggest members of Gabra, people that have the biggest followings, just happened, of course, some of the biggest members of Gabber, people that have the biggest followings, continue to make very offensive anti-Semitic jokes, you know, calling Jewish people parasites, you know, calling Jewish people kikes. And this happened after? Oh, yeah, this happened right after the shooting, saying that, you know, it's a good thing that this happened.

Terrible things that, after such a shocking, you know, hate crime occurred, you know, I think the biggest anti-Semitic hate crime in recent U.S. history, and on Gab, it was, you know, by some members, it was celebrated. So I want to come back to that. But first, can we talk a little bit about the alleged shooter in the Pittsburgh shooting and what we know about what he was doing on Gab? So he had a profile on Gab. He joined the social network and on Gab he was posting things, mostly incredibly anti-Semitic things, right? Like about how we have to kill Jews. The last thing he posted just a few hours before he opened fire on the synagogue

was, I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I'm going in. And this was right before the shooting? This was right before the shooting, yes. And then as you mentioned, after the shooting, and the days after the shooting, there continued to be anti-Semitic remarks made on Gab in relation to the shooting. Yeah, by some of Gab's most prominent members. These most prominent members, what do we know about the people who are part of Gab? Do they run the gambit? Do they come from everywhere? It's hard to know because there's a lot of anonymity. But, you know, there's folks like Christopher Cantwell, who is a kind of an infamous white nationalist that was engaged in a lot of the organizing and violence in the 2017 Unite the Right rally.

Of course we're capable. I'm carrying a pistol. I go to the gym all the time. I'm trying to make myself more capable of violence. There's far right podcasters. Gavin McGinnis is on Gab. Of the Proud Boys. My guys, just 14 of them, just walked into a mob of 200 people, said, I thought you guys were tough. Yes, fringe right, I would even say, not even in the far right, like, you know, violent group.

far right, like, you know, violent group. So, you know, these characters have found home and community on Gab. You know, anyone who kind of has a fringe right following or hate community probably has a profile on Gab, Alex Jones. Do we have a sense of the scope of it? I think there's something around 400,000 people on the platform now. I do want to talk about what's happened to Gab since the shooting. There's unsurprisingly has been a massive backlash against Gab. And so what's the latest? Right. People have really said, well, where did he feel that he could find community in these

beliefs? And the answer to that has been the social network Gab. And in response to that, companies that interoperated with Gab have decided to pull their service. And so that has included the payment processors Stripe and PayPal, as well as GoDaddy, the domain name service, Joyent, who is providing cloud hosting. And the internet is a network of networks. And when a few companies that you're working with decide they don't want to service you anymore, you're going to have to find other companies to host your site or you're going to go offline.

So these big players, the players that would process the payment so that Gab could make the money to keep going, they're refusing to process the payments. Not just payment processing, also cloud hosting and domain name service, like infrastructure stuff too. I would imagine it might be difficult to go and find another alternative. I'm sure it probably exists. We saw this happen with the Daily Stormer in August of 2017 after the Unite the Right rally. The Daily Stormer was August of 2017 after the Unite the Right rally. The Daily Stormer was the website

that where much of the organizing around Unite the Right took place. When that rally became deadly, service providers decided to stop doing business with the Daily Stormer. And, you know, they lost their security to prevent them from getting, you know, DDoS attacked. They lost their security to prevent them from getting DDoS attacked. They lost their hosting provider and they didn't have a place to exist anymore. They had to go into the dark web and then find some obscure hosting outside of the country and in a place that really is probably less aware or didn't care about the type of content that they were hosting. And how is Gab defending itself against these accusations that it says that it incites violence? Well, Gab says that they allow for, you know, radical free speech, they're free speech

absolutists, but that, you know, they have a zero tolerance policy against violence. It's free speech within legal limits, right? And it's common sense stuff like don't break the law. Anything illegal, get off the site, right? Take it somewhere else. And I have written that there's a real moral bankruptcy with that equation because we know that hate speech leads to violence and hate speech, we could even say is a form of violence. And so to say that we allow people to say vile things, to say they want to kill people because of their race or religion or gender, or they want to do awful things to people, or they think certain people shouldn't exist or exist in a lesser way, and then say, oh, but we don't allow violence. And so they kicked off the suspect profile as that.

They have said that they've kicked him off and that they have a clear zero tolerance policy against violence and that they are cooperating with law enforcement. Without Gab, the FBI and the DOJ would not have this mountain of evidence for a motive against this alleged terrorist. Right. So they say that they are free speech absolutists and then they say they don't, but what they draw a line on violence. I'm looking at a statement from them right now they say they've been smeared by the mainstream media for defending free expression and individual liberty for all people and we will happily take the slings and arrows from the dishonest and disgusting media elites and we're going to stand tall and fight for free expression and individual liberty for all people. You know, I would say looking at history that the lines there really don't,

like you can't draw a line at violence. You have to draw a line at hate speech, in my opinion. And from what I've seen, I mean, Dylan Roof and Anders Breivik, Dylan Roof, you know, who, you know, I think nine people died in a church in South Carolina. And Anders Breivik, of course, in Norway, who shot and killed dozens and dozens of people in both bombings and shootings, I believe. Over 70 people, yeah. And they were active members of an online community called Stormfront, which is the oldest and largest neo-Nazi white supremacist community on the Internet. They found validation in it.

They were able to talk to people about their racist ideas. And, you know, as they talked about it, they probably decided at some point, we know with Dylan Roof especially, that it was time to take this off the internet and bring it into the real world. Dylan Roof in his manifesto, we know he explicitly said, you know, we have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well, someone has to have the bravery to take it into the real world. And I guess it has to be me. And he described how he found these alt-right websites and he began to see how he agreed with them and how they made sense to him.

And he kind of was indoctrinated online. So I have this much better understanding of Gab having spoken to you. But I think what I'm struggling with here is how this plays out. Because it does feel like a game of whack-a-mole, right? These sites get deplatformed or they get shut down for a couple of months. Another site springs up. I also have questions about the role that the big social media companies play in this as well. I struggle a bit by trying to figure out where this is going, because it feels like every time you plug one hole, another one opens. And then on top of that, you have these massive social media engines where hate is still being spread, or hateful ideas are

still being spread, and they have such a huge, huge reach. Well, you're always going to be playing whack-a-mole with these groups. The thing is that when you make it harder for them to organize and harder for them to have a public presence or an easily findable presence, then it's harder for them to recruit. It's harder for them to indoctrinate. It's harder for people to find them and agree with them and to coalesce around their hateful ideas. And, you know, maybe they'll find a place

on the dark web to go, but then I couldn't find them. Or maybe I could because I'm a journalist, but other people would have a much more difficult time finding them. Now, you're right that there are, you know, hateful people on Facebook and Twitter. And there have been instances where these, you know, more mainstream social media platforms have allowed hate to flourish and have been not good at dealing with harassment in any way. And I agree, this has been a huge problem. The difference though, is that when you log onto Twitter, it's not what it's about. It's not the first thing you see. You kind of have to look for it or find it. And it has been a huge problem. And we see, for instance, with the Alex Jones case, he was using Facebook and Twitter and YouTube to espouse conspiracy theories that were causing harm in the real world for years

before the platforms took serious action against him. I suppose that would be my response to that, that there is quite a bit, there has been quite a bit of it out there for a long time. There would be people that would push back on that. Yeah, and they should push back. And these companies have not done a great job. But the difference is when you have a kind of a social network that's really designated for this, right?

And that's really a place that's explicitly a safe place for this. Yes, Twitter and Facebook have not been good at enforcing their rules, but they have rules against it. And they should be better at enforcing their rules. And hopefully they will be moving forward and they have been getting better at that over the years. But it's different when you explicitly allow this. April, thanks so much for your time. We really appreciate it. Thank you. That's it for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner.

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