Gab CEO Andrew Torba is at it again. Just when you thought things couldn’t possibly get any worse over at Gab, Torba decided to publish a blog post declaring a war on his users. That’s not hyperbole either, he literally says that he is waging a war in the post.
Let’s go through Torba’s statement paragraph by paragraph.
Gab is a platform dedicated to preserving and promoting free speech while maintaining a safe environment for all users. Balancing these two objectives can be a delicate dance, as we strive to protect the rights of individuals to express themselves while simultaneously ensuring that our community remains free from subversive bad actors who seek to destroy Gab by any means necessary.
Gab is most definitely not a platform dedicated to free speech. Several people have been banned for criticizing various management and policy decisions. They also recently blocked links to the homosexual wedding of Andrew Torba’s brother Jacob Torba who has apparently been involved with Gab as an employee in some capacity. Some have said that he has been involved in content moderation. This is absolutely information of public interest considering Torba’s brand is based entirely around being some alleged Christian nationalist person. It indicates that his brand is nothing but a grift.
Perhaps most relevant to this topic has been Torba’s decision to make posting images and videos a paid feature. This is a direct attack on the ability to spread information and speech itself. It has made the organic spread of memes impossible. They also admitted to doing a shadow ban on non-paying users by openly stating that “Pro” users will get elevated visibility on the “explore” page which shows trending Gab posts.
His former CTO Rob Colbert actually put out a post calling free speech “horseshit.”
Colbert blocked me after I highlighted this. He is apparently not interested in any sort of dialogue or conversation about his belief that freedom of speech is “horseshit.” It’d be one thing if he was referring to Jews or whatever, but he’s obviously referencing Gab users who he dislikes and has disagreements with.
Torba basically sounds no different than the various Silicon Valley Jews who have spoken regularly about censoring free speech in the name of “safety” and other nonsense. It’s utterly nauseating.
Here Torba openly declares war on his users by claiming that he’s fighting a supposed conspiracy to bring down Gab.
We are waging war on the people who are on Gab for the sole purpose of bringing down the platform. These are foreign and domestic operatives whose only objective is to drive people away from Gab and destroy, divide, and defame Gab and myself by any means necessary. Their time here in our community is up. I’m no longer paying to host people here who want my family and my business dead.
He seems to imply that the people who have criticized his poor decisions are conspiring to destroy the site when it is he who has done that on his own. He also offers no evidence that there are people who want him dead. People are just angry that his stupid decisions have turned Gab into a digital wasteland and they have every right to be mad about that. All sorts of people put a great deal of time and energy into building their user presence only to have the rug pulled out from under them.
Furthermore, his declaration of war is extremely vague and it is not entirely clear who he is declaring war against. It is vague enough where you have to presume that he is declaring war against a fairly broad chunk of Gab’s userbase.
Here he complains about facing dox threats and basically claims that people who disagree with him are subversive mentally ill people who do not deserve free speech. He also says that he plans on banning these people at minimum which is basically an implied lawfare threat.
After facing a barrage of threats, doxxing, and other unhinged behavior over the past few weeks I’ve come to the conclusion that these subversive mentally ill people don’t deserve the freedom of speech, they deserve to be committed. Why on earth are we giving our enemies the freedom of speech and a platform they can use to destroy us with? It’s foolishness. At a minimum these people are being expelled from Gab for good. Threats and harassment are not protected by the First Amendment and they aren’t protected by Gab’s terms of service. In the past we have been far too forgiving and lenient with giving people second, third, and fourth chances to change their behavior. That ends now.
It’s really rich for Torba to complain about being a victim of doxing considering his former CTO Rob Colbert just talked about building dossiers on Gab users for the purpose of doxing them.
Torba finishes the post by describing how he’s going to ban all sorts of people who he claims are part of this vast conspiracy to destroy Gab. He uses all sorts of gay buzzwords and rhetoric to justify his plans to do mass bans on accounts that he claims are threatening Gab’s allegedly “amazing community.”
The Previous Policy: Focus on Individual Content Removal
For a long time Gab relied on a policy that focused on removing individual pieces of content that violated our community guidelines. This approach often involved issuing warnings to users before taking action on specific posts or comments. However, this strategy has shown limitations, as some users continued to engage in threatening, spammy, and harassing behavior even after multiple warnings. This led to the ongoing presence of toxic elements within the community, which often drove good and decent users away.
The New Policy: Removal of Entire Accounts
In response to these challenges, Gab has decided to take a more proactive approach by removing entire accounts that engage in threatening, harassing, or spamming behavior. This shift in policy is a direct response to the shortcomings of the previous approach, which failed to effectively deter users from engaging in problematic activities. By removing entire accounts instead of just individual pieces of content, Gab aims to send a clear message that such behavior will not be tolerated and will ultimately lead to account termination.
We are giving no quarter to subversive accounts that exist for one reason and one reason only: to destroy Gab and our amazing community.
In order to strike the right balance between protecting free speech and ensuring the safety of our community, we must continually assess and refine our approach to content moderation. This involves ongoing discussions with users, legal experts, and other stakeholders to ensure that our policies remain both effective and fair.
Ultimately, our goal is to create a platform where individuals can freely express themselves while also feeling safe and protected from subversive freaks who want to scare them off the platform with violent threats and make Gab look bad.
As we continue to evolve and grow as a platform, we remain committed to the principles of free speech and community protection. By working together with our users and partners, we believe that we can create a space where individuals can engage in healthy and productive dialogue while also not facing a barrage of threats and harassment from subversive people who want to destroy Gab.
We’re cleaning up Gab and it’s long overdue.
We hope you’ll join us.
If you want to support our efforts please consider upgrading to GabPRO so we can continue building.
The reaction to his edict has not gone over well. Torba previously blocked me on Gab so I can’t see his timeline, but Azzmador from The Krypto Report provided me with a bunch of screen grabs from people who can still view Torba’s timeline. It would appear as if 95 to 99 percent of the comments directed at Torba have been negative.
Here’s a sampling.
Gab was founded on the promise of letting people “speak freely.” It has been clear for awhile that this promise was always a lie. I knew it was a lie years ago when I saw Torba ban weev for engaging in lawful and Constitutionally protected speech at 2AM Eastern Time. This edict by Torba only cements what I’ve known for years.
This is the end of Gab. The site no longer serves any practical or useful purpose. Torba has through his own policies, transformed it into a digital wasteland. Outside of some MAGA boomers and shill accounts with bot-inflated followers there is nothing going on. Engagement was never great on Gab but these changes have caused engagement to fall off a cliff.
We can only speculate as to why Torba has done this to Gab. He could be acting on orders from a third party or he could just be retarded. It might even be a combination of both. I really do not know. Either way, he has poured gasoline on an already raging dumpster fire and it is hard to see Gab financially surviving this without mass infusions of cash from an outside source. If the site is somehow still online by 2025 it will be a rotting corpse of its former self.
