Gab’s CEO Andrew Torba who has quickly become a very hated figure in recent days, wrote a hilarious article claiming that artificial intelligence killed social media. He actually says in the piece that AI tools are why a site like Gab needs to be paywalled. He further states that a paywall is necessary to defeat AI bots. This is a highly dubious and questionable claim to say the least.
The reason why this is so hilarious is that Torba has been regularly shilling a shitty Gab-branded generative AI product. In fact, he’s been investing all sorts of time, energy and resources into it while claiming that he had no money to pay for storage. He claimed the lack of storage space is why he could no longer let people post memes for free.
It’s as if he’s crafting a narrative trying to blame AI for Gab failing instead of his ridiculous decisions. It’s just such a dumb narrative considering his very public role in shilling Gab’s horrible AI tool. Like what is he saying? Is he admitting to purposefully destroying his own site with his AI shilling? That seems to be what he’s implying at least.
People are continuing to leave the site in droves over the inability to post and spread memes organically. There’s also the issues of questionable user bans along with Gab’s former CTO threatening to dox people that have further accelerated this exodus.
This phenomenon was noted by world famous political commentator Azzmador of The Krypto Report earlier today. This in response to Gab user Lars Karl Sorensen who said he was leaving the site because of the doxing threats.
As I noted in a prior article, the site is quickly turning into a digital wasteland. The content is not better as Torba has falsely claimed. It is objectively worse. Engagement is way down and the “Explore” section is still filled with all sorts of dumb screen captures of Twitter posts and other boring boomer-tier MAGA posts. In fact, this phenomenon seems to be accelerating.
None of this is particularly surprising because the primary demographic of people who would buy a Gab “Pro” account so they have the alleged “privilege” of posting memes would be MAGA boomers. Few people outside of the most ardent Gab shills are going to pay money to post memes. This has been a basic function of social media sites for well over a decade and it is laughable that Gab now considers this a premium feature.
Torba has even tried to hide all of the criticism he has received by flooding his feed with endless reposts. He has also deleted some of his original posts that were given the ratio treatment.
This is something Azzmador also noted.
Azzmador had his account verified a long while ago so his account still has the ability to post images and videos. The thing is, even if you have this ability, there is no guarantee the function will work. He tried to upload a small cat video in mp4 format only for the cat video upload to fail.
The mp4 format has been around since the early 2000s and is a fairly common video format. It is not unreasonable for somebody to expect mp4 video uploads to work.
The Gab AI tool which is supposed to be “based” is not “based” and objectively sucks. One Gab user noted how the tool refused to give him an English translation of an Adolf Hitler speech because of “human rights” etc..
However, Gab user Alyocat reported that it did produce a short story about Jacob Torba’s first homosexual experience. Jacob is Andrew’s brother.
All of this is just insane.
Whatever you think about Gab, it has been one of the more prominent social media sites in the world of Alt-Tech hosting dissident content. The fact that Torba appears to be deliberately destroying the site and effectively purging real right-wing users with all this stupidity is significant news. Especially considering we are in the midst of an election cycle. His article about AI being responsible for killing social media just makes all of this even more insane, stupid and ridiculous. Would it have been so hard for him just to run a normal site and let people communicate organically? Apparently that was too much of an ask.
