Gab’s CEO initial response to calls for banning Nehlen from their platform for revealing Ricky Vaughn’s actual identity vs. today’s statement.
[Unless you’re PJW please don’t say “life comes at you fast,” it’s so overused!]
Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.
In the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in American history, a mass shooting on October 27 left 11 dead in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA. Reporters unearthed violently anti-Semitic messages the shooter had posted on the platform Gab, using an account that has since been deleted. Legacy media and companies that enabled Gab to sustain itself online are starting to grapple with the prominence of hate speech on the site, but for Gab, extremism has always been a feature, not a bug.
While activists had alerted some companies working with Gab that the site was transparently violating terms of service, it took a fatal mass shooting for payment processors Paypal and Stripe and cloud host Joyent to drop Gab. The site’s CTO has reportedly resigned, Gab was temporarily inaccessible, and its founder Andrew Torba is “working around the clock” for the site to remain online. Torba asked for prayers for his plight and in a particularly tone-deaf post characterized the site as being “under attack.”
Trolling and harassment have been part of Torba’s business model since Gab’s founding in 2016. Torba himself was sacked from the alumni network of a startup accelerator he was a part of after he engaged in pro-Trump online harassment of a Latino, and he was photographed next to Milo Yiannopoulos, a Nazi sympathizer who was booted off of Twitter after organizing racist harassment of Black actress Leslie Jones.
Gab was born in reaction to social media platforms that ban hate speech, extremism, and harassment, explicitly meant to provide a haven to those whose extremist content had gotten them banned from other platforms, specifically Twitter. Since the beginning, Torba and Gab’s chief communications officer, Utsav Sanduja, claimed that free speech came above anything else, and that they included harassment under free speech, telling Mic in March 2017: “Political incorrectness is a First Amendment right. … We support freedom of speech and reject the politically correct definitions of what constitutes ‘harassment.’ [Social-justice warriors] do not get to define the verbiage, lexicon, culture or societal politics of the internet. Gab … will repeal this politically correct, censorship culture.”
They knew extremism was what motivated users to go on their site. So much that, as Sanduja acknowledged in 2017, they were looking into removing the downvoting feature (a feature similar to reddit’s in which users can “upvote” or “downvote” posts so that posts can jump above others and get more prominently featured) because it was enabling targeted harassment and driving women away from the site. (During the email exchanges with Mic, Sanduja addressed journalist Melanie Ehrenkranz in a sexist manner.)
Extremists embraced the platform as an opportunity, and white nationalist darling Tucker Carlson hostedTorba during his prime-time show on Fox to promote Gab, failing to mention the extremism that had already festered on the site.
After Twitter enforced new rules in December 2017 that resulted in a purge of several “alt-right” accounts filled with hate speech, users on Gab welcomed Twitter refugees warmly.
Prominent white nationalist Christopher Cantwell — dubbed the “crying Nazi” following his teary reactions to the 2017 Charlottesville, VA, Unite the Right rally — posted a message for newcomers with an anti-Semitic greeting, compelling them to not “worry about the racism” on the site, while recognizing that “it can be a little weird at first:”
The racism that Cantwell called “a little weird” was rampant and uncensored on the site, until neo-Nazi Andrew Auernheimer (best known online as weev) became the first person to be banned from Gab. weev, who has now migrated to guest appearances on racist shows on YouTube, was banned after Asia Registry, which used to host Gab, threatened to boot the site over a post in which weev wrote: “Jews have cornered the whole Internet. … And I think the only way we’ll have any freedom of speech here is if someone teaches them a lesson.”
Instead of acknowledging that extremism was a problem in the site, Torba claimed weev was among users posting extremism to “break the guidelines on purpose”; the idea was that they were trying to goad leadership into banning them to show they would break their commitment to free speech. A Gab user protesting wwev’s ban noted that the hashtag “gas the kikes” “is a constant statement on here and people are not getting banned.”
After white nationalist Paul Nehlen — who ran as a Republican in a 2017 attempt to unseat Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) — became the second person to be banned, it became clear that Gab’s application of its own rules was arbitrary. Despite obvious guideline violations, it wasn’t Nehlen’s often violent posts or his blatant white supremacy that got him sacked from the site. It was the politics over his revealing the true identity of the white supremacist known online as Ricky Vaughn, to which Gab’s leadership reacted inconsistently. First, Torba shrugged off what was being called a doxxing (revealing someone’s contact information to enable their harassment), only acting to remove Nehlen from the platform after the overwhelming support for Vaughn among Gab users made supporting Nehlen’s presence on the site untenable.
Gab’s CEO initial response to calls for banning Nehlen from their platform for revealing Ricky Vaughn’s actual identity vs. today’s statement.
[Unless you’re PJW please don’t say “life comes at you fast,” it’s so overused!]
Nehlen doxxing one of his critics was consistent with other doxxing operations — in which trolls organize to spread the contact information of a person they want to make the target of harassment — going on undisturbed at Gab in ways identical to on anonymous message boards 4chan and 8chan. For example, after Judge William Young ruled in favor of upholding current Massachusetts gun regulations that ban assault weapons, pro-gun trolls on Gab set their sight on Young and doxxed him in retaliation. Another instance of organized harassment on Gab was an “operation” in which trolls targeted progressive voices on Twitter, instructing each other to use Twitter reporting mechanisms against a list of progressive accounts in what they felt was retaliation for their own banning from Twitter in the first place. Torba not only tolerated such operations: He encouraged them, calling followers to engage in fraudulent mass reporting on Twitter in the name of causing chaos.
For those of us tracking extremism on the site, the ways in which it served as an alternate universe where public opinion was supplanted by hate speech, became obvious. On any given day, activism took the form of white supremacy and users would fearmonger about diversity. Under the site’s “groups” feature, extremists openly organized under explicitly racist categories.
I have logged onto Gab nearly every day for over a year because of work. @getongab — above anything else — is an engine for anti-Semitism and bigotry. Already bloodthirsty posters are calling the killer a “hero” — this is typical Gab stuff: pic.twitter.com/K5jjeSS3iO
— Michael Edison Hayden 🐆 (@MichaelEHayden) October 27, 2018
More specifically, Gab offered racist interpretations of current events daily. After HuffPost reported that an anti-abortion activist was in fact a white nationalist, posters on Gab reacted with a shrug, complaining that “ethnonationalism” was “socially controversial,” and saying they hoped mainstream media reports like that would help “more people become white nationalist or identitarian.” On April 20, posters openly celebrated Adolf Hitler’s birthday, as evidenced by the site’s popular topics that day, and the reactions to the verdict that declared Bill Cosby guilty of assault were an intersection of racism and misogyny. On International Women’s Day, a sample of Gab takes included complaints that women had abandoned their “one job” of raising the next generation by joining the workforce, as well as statements like, “Women only belong in one place, and that’s in my basement shackled to the radiator; only to occasionally be let out so they can make me a sandwich.”
Happy #InternationalWomensDay from the lovely people on Gab! #IWD2018 pic.twitter.com/wO8sHXTs1C
— cristina lópez g. (@crislopezg) March 8, 2018
The site’s extremist content often went beyond hateful words and into explicit exaltations of violence. Before he was banned, Nehlen prompted a discussion of a caravan of Central American immigrants in 2017 that included talk of armed militias, killing “every last one” and using them as “target practice.”
Neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin openly called for shooting Middle Eastern refugees and blamed Jewish people for waging “a psychological war” to push for the right of refugees to come to the U.S.: “All it would take to stop this is a few bullets.” And that wasn’t the first time Anglin had posted about shooting up Jewish people, but Gab leadership told a journalist asking for a reaction that he hadn’t crossed a line.
Another post that did not raise to the level of crossing a line for Gab was Anglin’s slur-laced, homophobic endorsement of corrective rape for lesbians.
However, even for someone as toxic as Anglin, unregulated speech on Gab was seemingly starting to get too toxic. In March, he complained that the trolling and abuse he was subjected to by fellow posters on Gab was made more burdensome by the site’s lack of a block button. Anglin felt that Gab’s mute button wasn’t enough.
Gab’s Sanduja responded to Anglin, seemingly taunting him to leave the site if he didn’t like it. Anglin claimed he used to encourage “people to use this site” but that posters replying to “every post” he made by “promoting terrorism” and “posting gay porn” was causing him to stop. Sanduja responded to Anglin’s tantrum and his troll supporters by exchanging slurs with them. After a user seemingly insulted his ethnicity by alluding to a type of visa foreign workers with specialty occupations use, writing “typical H1B monkey,” Sanduja responded, “You’re welcome for the free speech, Stormfag” (in reference to Anglin’s site the Daily Stormer).
Gab’s leadership has always downplayed evidence of the extremism that festered on the site, potentially to avoid scaring away investors; leaders once told Daily Beast’s Kelly Weill that they thought “some of Gab’s Nazis are actually fake Nazis, who are just trying to make Gab look bad.” Neither Torba nor Sanduja offered proof of this claim, relying instead on the conspiracy theory that progressive organizations were supporting fake Gab accounts that post extremism to give the site a bad image, a theory that echoes somewhat the “false flag” reaction the far-right has faced with instances of right-wing extremism.
This mindset explains why financial pressures have been the only incentives that have made Gab’s leaders act against extremism on their site. Torba has always framed pressure from his third-party providers to regulate Gab’s content as “censorship” to free speech, going on like-minded Alex Jones’ Infowars outlet repeatedly to complain. He’s apparently aware of the ways violent neo-Nazi groups like the Atomwaffen Division use Gab and has done nothing.
Since people are finally paying attention to @getongab, I want to highlight again that the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division and others plotting violence are organizing on that platform out in the open.
The CEO does nothing about this issue: pic.twitter.com/80QOsdwmqe
— Michael Edison Hayden 🐆 (@MichaelEHayden) October 27, 2018
Back in August, Gab’s hosting provider, Microsoft Azure, gave the site 48 hours to remove two virulently anti-Semitic posts made by defeated neo-Nazi congressional candidate Patrick Little (who also ran as a Republican in a primary and is verified by Gab on the site). Little was suggesting raising Jewish people “as livestock,” and vowing to attack Holocaust memorials in the U.S. with a sledge hammer. After Azure’s pressure, the site removed the posts in contention, but before the site was taken offline, Little was still on Gab, where he reacted to the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting by urging his followers to blame the victims.
In an email statement to its users a full day after the synagogue shooting, Gab disavowed and condemned “all acts of terrorism and violence” but also condemned the press by saying, “We refused to be defined by the media’s narratives about Gab and our community.” In the statement, Gab’s leadership continued to take no responsibility for the extremism the platform has enabled since its inception by saying, “Criminals and criminal behavior exist on every social media platform.”
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“Donald Trump mocks Joe Biden’s stutter,” the headlines blare, and I am confronted (again) with (more) proof that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee hates people like me.
I don’t remember when they told me I stuttered, but I do remember the banana chips I got as “rewards” in the speech room in my Ohio grade school. I learned tricks that worked well and tricks that didn’t, tricks that I still use to this day, and tricks I’ve long forgotten. I don’t remember if I got picked on for it, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Fifth grade was my Nerd Year, after all, plagued by incessant bullying and the kid-violence that comes with it.But I do remember when the former vice president “came out” as a stutterer in a sprawling profile in The Atlantic, written by John Hendrickson, a stutterer himself.
I already knew Biden stuttered, because I’m a stutterer and Extremely Online, but the big reveal rippled through the media and endeared him to the public. People seemed to be watching for the former vice president to get caught on words, just so they could loudly forgive him for it. He even invited a young stutterer to be part of the virtual Democratic National Convention that summer, and I cried as I watched the video.
Some four years later, my response to video of Trump mocking Biden elicited a far different response.
The Washington Post, August 21, 2020:
Twenty seconds into his speech to the Democratic National Convention on Thursday, Brayden Harrington started to stutter.
He knew he would — it was the reason the 13-year-old was addressing millions of viewers from his bedroom. As he had explained to kick off his speech, his life had changed after meeting former vice president Joe Biden in February.
“He told me that we were members of the same club. We ... ” Brayden said, shutting his eyes as he drew out an “s” sound, willing the word to emerge: “... stutter.”
And then, he kept going — smiling, poised, and delivering a powerful message about how Biden, who has spoken openly of his battle with a speech impediment, had inspired him to reach higher.
“He kept going.” I have two words, in my own handwriting, inked where my right wrist meets my palm: Keep going.They’re words that apply to many situations—how I got through a rough childhood, a challenging young adulthood, more than one breakup, and a spinal injury in 2018. But those words whisper encouragement when I cover my mouth to “reset” during those moments when my mouth stops listening to my brain.
It’s a trick I learned in that small speech room in elementary school. It requires me to stop trying to speak and focus on just being present.
Biden has other tricks.
The Atlantic, January/February 2020:
At first, Biden sounded strong, confident, presidential: “My plan makes a limit of co-pay to be One. Thousand. Dollars. Because we—”
He stopped. He pinched his eyes closed. He lifted his hands and thrust them forward, as if trying to pull the missing sound from his mouth. “We f-f-f-f-further support—” He opened his eyes. “The uh-uh-uh-uh—” His chin dipped toward his chest. “The-uh, the ability to buy into the Obamacare plan.” Biden also stumbled when trying to say immune system.
Fox News edited these moments into a mini montage. Stifling laughter, the host Steve Hilton narrated: “As the right words struggled to make that perilous journey from Joe Biden’s brain to Joe Biden’s mouth, half the time he just seemed to give up with this somewhat tragic and limp admission of defeat.”
I remember that montage. It sickened us here in the Daily Kos newsroom, because it was so unapologetically childish and cruel. I took it particularly hard, because I’ve lost so many words to “that perilous journey.”
Stress exacerbates my stutter. It’s a force multiplier. So when, for a few years in my life, I found myself speaking before crowds and before cameras, I wasn’t surprised when no amount of preparation guaranteed my carefully chosen words would make it out of my mouth without encountering obstacles. I’d fret for weeks, wondering if I’d manage to avoid getting caught up, and if I did, if I’d be able to keep going.
Then a good friend advised me to own it. “Once you’ve reset, just smile, say ‘sorry, I stutter, so that might happen again,’ and just keep going. And remember those people want to hear what you have to say. They’ll wait.”
And that’s what I did. That’s what I still do. And I remember that folks want to listen to me, and waiting a few seconds for me to squeak out a word isn’t the big deal I think it is.
And so it is for Biden. When the president speaks, people listen. Even if they have to wait a few seconds.
As Hendrickson wrote for The Atlantic on March 10, 2024, after Trump mocked Biden for his stuttering incidents during an undeniably successfully State of the Union speech:
Stuttering is one of many disabilities to have entered Trump’s crosshairs. In 2015, he infamously made fun of a New York Times reporter’s disabled upper-body movements. Three years later, as president, when planning a White House event for military veterans, he asked his staff not to include amputees wounded in combat, saying, “Nobody wants to see that.” Stuttering is a neurological disorder that affects roughly 3 million Americans.
[...]
For a time, Trump exercised a modicum of restraint around this topic. As I once wrote, Trump was probably wise enough to realize that, to paraphrase Michael Jordan, Republicans stutter too.
[...]
Trump may be among the most famous and powerful people in modern history, but he remains a small-minded bully. He mocks Biden’s disability because he believes the voters will reward him for it—that there is more to be gained than lost by dehumanizing his rival and the millions of other Americans who stutter, or who go through life managing other disorders and disabilities.
The rights and dignity of the disabled have always mattered to me, but after my injury, I am more aware of how cruel the world can be to those with different or fewer abilities. Watching the opposition party become the “fuck your feelings” party of wannabe fascists these last nine years should embarrass and enrage us all.
Alliteration is especially tough for me, and when I know it’s coming, I slow my words and enunciate them with almost comical intensity. But I don’t stutter when I type. And so I can easily say that I’m ready to spend the next seven-plus months beating bullies, building benches, saving statehouses and the Senate, and righting wrongs.
I’ll never say “fuck your feelings” to anyone, even a MAGA zealot, because that’s just not me. But I will say this—a few times, fast, even:
Fuck fascism.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ve earned some banana chips.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos
NEW YORK, March 25 (Reuters) - Donald Trump faces a Monday deadline to post a bond to cover a $454 million civil fraud judgment or face the risk of New York state seizing some of his marquee properties.Trump, seeking to regain the presidency this year, must either pay the money out of his own pocket or post a bond while he appeals Justice Arthur Engoron's February 16 judgment against him for manipulating his net worth and his family real estate company's property values to dupe lenders and insurers.
On Monday morning, Trump wrote on social media that the number Engoron set was "fraudulent.""It should be ZERO, I DID NOTHING WRONG!," he said.The Trump campaign on Friday called for donations from "one million pro-Trump patriots," saying that the "iconic Trump Tower" was among his properties at risk of seizure.The case cuts to the core of his public image as a prosperous businessman. Trump rose to fame as a developer of flashy properties like Manhattan's Trump Tower and often boasts of his financial success - even though his companies have at times struggled.
But Trump, the Republican candidate challenging Democratic President Joe Biden in the November 5 election, now faces a web of financial worries including campaign fundraising lagging behind his rival.
The judgment in the case was entered in Manhattan, where Trump properties such as Trump Tower or 40 Wall Street may be in the sights of New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat who brought the civil case in 2022.
James also has notified Westchester County, just north of New York City, of the judgment, a step toward potentially seizing assets there such as a Trump golf course and a 60-room mansion and estate called Seven Springs.
Taking control of Trump's properties would pose a host of legal and logistical challenges for the attorney general's office. Placing liens on them to ensure they are not sold or transferred and going after Trump's liquid assets would be more straightforward.
Trump has denied wrongdoing and called the case politically motivated. The first former U.S. president ever to face criminal charges, Trump has been indicted in four separate cases, pleading not guilty in each.In one of those cases, a New York judge on Monday is set to hear arguments on Trump's bid to postpone a mid-April start date over charges related to hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 U.S. election.
In the civil fraud case, Trump's lawyers have said 30 surety companies have rejected his requests to post a bond securing the judgment, and have asked that he be allowed to post $100 million instead. They have asked a mid-level state appeals court to delay enforcement of the judgment.
During a 2023 deposition by the attorney general's office, Trump said his companies had more than $400 million in cash. In a social media post on Friday, he said he had almost $500 million in cash, but intended to use much of it on his campaign.
"I will be forced to mortgage or sell Great Assets, perhaps at Fire Sale prices," Trump wrote on social media last week.
Trump came a step closer to a windfall on Friday after investors approved a $5.7 billion deal to list the company that owns his Truth Social platform on the stock market. Trump's majority stake in the company, Trump Media & Technology Group, is worth about $3.3 billion.
But even if the deal gets completed this week, it is unclear if it would help Trump cover the judgment. That is because he previously agreed to terms preventing him from selling his shares for six months or borrowing against them.
Before the three-month, non-jury trial in Manhattan, Engoron found that Trump had engaged in fraud by overvaluing properties including his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, his penthouse apartment in Manhattan's Trump Tower, and various office buildings and golf courses.
This case is not the only one to drain Trump's finances. Trump this month posted a $91.6 million bond to cover an $83.3 million defamation verdict for writer E. Jean Carroll while he appeals. She sued him after Trump called her a liar for accusing him of raping her decades ago. He has denied wrongdoing.
Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Additional reporting by Jack Queen in New York and Nathan Layne in Milton, Connecticut Editing by Will Dunham and Noeleen Walder