Gab: alt-right's social media alternative attracts users banned from Twitter

Gab is the brainchild of Andrew Torba, an adtech startup founder who now lives in Austin after a stint in Silicon Valley. He found the politically progressive atmosphere of the Bay Area to be stifling, making him uncomfortable about expressing his views, and he moved to Texas to help build his fledgling social network. He was once a member of Y Combinator (he was recently ousted), and has now taken on the mission of fixing what he sees as the censorship that plagues online spaces. The tipping point that pushed him to leave the tech bubble and start Gab came earlier this year, when he read that several Facebook employees had come forward to divulge that the network’s trending topics section was actively suppressing conservative news. "I knew I had to take action," Torba says.

So he created Gab, which is similar to Twitter in that users can only write a limited number of characters (up to 300) in a single post and also mimics Reddit in that these posts can be up-voted or down-voted.

WHAT IS GAB?
Thus far the social network is in closed beta. Torba says it has about 56,000 users along with a waitlist of over 120,000. When Gab first launched in August, it got a little bit of press. But with the election now over there seems to be renewed interest in the platform. Torba tells me that this past Tuesday was the biggest day the site has seen for signups, with more than 5,000 people showing interest in that 24-hour period alone.

A Twitter user conducted an interesting experiment to sniff out double standards in the site's censorship policy concerning race.

The person wrote the same comment on two different accounts with only two words changed, then reported each for abusive behavior.

The first comment read: "I fucking hate white people and their inconsiderate asses for voting for Trump. Fuck you."

The second: "I fucking hate black people and their inconsiderate asses for voting for Clinton. Fuck you."

The first was found not to be in "violation of Twitter's Rules regarding abusive behavior," while the second resulted in the user's account being banned.