Gab.com goes down after GoDaddy threatens to pull domain

https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/28/18036520/gab-down-godaddy-domain-blocked

54 108 8 years ago

"Gab is presently inaccessible through its website, with a message stating that the company is “under attack” and “working around the clock to get Gab.com back online” with a new provider. “We have been smeared by the mainstream media for defending free expression and individual liberty for all people and for working with law enforcement to ensure that justice is served for the horrible atrocity committed in Pittsburgh,” the statement reads."

ChrisGranger• 8 years ago

http://gab.ai/ has their full statement.

russelldc• 8 years ago

We have been smeared by the mainstream media [...] for working with law enforcement to ensure that justice is served for the horrible atrocity committed in Pittsburgh

That's quite an interesting spin.

Zuider12• 8 years ago

If you believe this statement is false, I would be most interested in understanding why you think so.

DanAndersen2• 8 years ago

Related: Gab had also posted a public statement [0] on Medium after the shooting in Pittsburgh.

However, Medium has now suspended Gab from their platform, so that the only way to read the statement is to use an archive link [1].

Hopefully the tech community learns from this about the dangers of using centralized external services for your public presence. If you find yourself under distributed political attack your voice will not make its way out there without being filtered by intermediary media outlets unless you own the full stack of your system from top to bottom.

[0] https://medium.com/@getongab/gab-com-statement-on-the-tree-o...

[1] http://archive.is/vysbL

Cthulhu_2• 8 years ago

Hopefully the tech community learns from this about the dangers of using centralized external services for your public presence.

Which means... what? Put your stuff on the dark web? Because if you host your own blog - GoDaddy can shut you down. Use an ISP that doesn't do anything? The domain name can be shut down. The internet is full of centralized services.

Amezarak4• 8 years ago

Medium's actions seem particularly bizarre and insidious. I can understand why people might believe that Gab should be shut down, even though I disagree (not very strongly - Gab, like Voat with Reddit, was capable only of attracting the worst of Twitter). But Medium appears to believe that defending the existence of a free speech platform is so fundamentally indefensible that it should be impermissible!

It also disturbs me how complete and total these lockouts tend to be - if you get put under the wrong spotlight, it's clear how completely and totally the corporate sphere will coordinate to shut you down. You won't even have a platform to defend yourself on, and the situation is getting worse, not better. Short of laying your own fiber cables and creating your own Internet, there's nothing you can do. This makes me very uneasy.

I think the NPR interview with the founder of Gab is worth listening to. [1] It strikes me that just a few years ago, most people would have been in support of their position. The world has changed dramatically in just a few years.

https://www.npr.org/2018/10/29/661676103/after-synagogue-att...

dx87• 8 years ago

Look through this thread, people have already decided that "free speech" is a dog whistle meaning that you are anti-semetic and support murder. It's a shame that people are willing to throw away their personal freedoms in exchange for fake civility.

SpecialistEMT• 8 years ago

How is this an issue of free speech? Im not aware medium said they will host anyone

orf4• 8 years ago

It's funny how those who cry hardest about being censored, when given a completely free space to express themselves, fill it to the brim with xenophobia, racism and anti-Semitism.

As much as free speech advocates may decry this, it works. Alex Jones audience has suffered since popular private companies have terminated their relationship with him.

nailer4• 8 years ago

You're nut picking [1]. A right wing person that is insane is more likely to use a right wing platform.

We shouldn't blame Twitter for insane left wing people killing cops and we shouldn't blame Gab for this right wing attack.

[1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nutpicking

orf4• 8 years ago

You also seem to be nut picking. I'm not really talking about the extreme ends that can be found on any platform. I am talking about the average discourse, which judging by the most popular posts is an appalling mix of the worst traits of humanity

Zuider12• 8 years ago

'Popular private companies' have been put under severe pressure by political activist groups such as David Brock's Media Matters to 'deplatform' conservatives. The 'ending of relationships' has not necessarily been due to completely internal decisions of those private companies. Alex Jones is crazy, but you ought to have been more careful in your wording so as not to associate him with anti-Semitism. He is, in fact, a Jewish convert, married to a Jewish woman.

quantummkv2• 8 years ago

This is where you are wrong my friend. Alex Jones audience has suffered on the popular private platforms that banned him. Please don't be under the delusion that he has lost any of his core followers.

The fact that you cannot see them on your platforms does not mean that he is out or lost followers. He simply moved to platforms that you do not visit or are not that much visible on the open internet. The internet does exist outside of FAANG.

anarazel9• 8 years ago

It's a significant difference whether you can become an infowars listener by watching a video on youtube that has infowars content as the next suggested title, or whether you need to explicitly search it out.

bradleyjg2• 8 years ago

I agree that there's a very important distinction between private actors and the government, and don't like the contemporaneous trend in online discussion spaces of trying to erase that distinction.

That said, registrars act under contract with ICAAN which is at least quasi-governmental. It makes me a lot less comfortable for them exercise unguided discretion than, say, an ISP or app store.

oldsklgdfth8• 8 years ago

As much as I can't stand hate speech rants on social media. I would much rather have these people in plain sight, where their views can be somewhat challenged, rather than sentencing them to the dark echo-chamber corners of the internet for them to brew up storms. Just my two sense. It's hurtful to hear some extreme views, but ignoring and ostracizing these people is not equivalent to eliminating hate.

spiderfarmer8• 8 years ago

Allowing these people in plain sight without any pushback normalizes their views. And by allowing them to have a large platform they can freely spread their "free-from-facts" propaganda that will speak to a subset of people who are easily misled. Challenging them in public will not help when they're also convincing people that critics are the enemies that are out to destroy them.

Free speech is being abused, plain and simple.

freehunter5• 8 years ago

On the other hand, putting those views out there to be seen by others also has the effect of encouraging others to either subscribe to those viewpoints or to feel comfortable expressing those viewpoints as well. If it's allowed on SOCIAL_MEDIA_X, it's implicitly socially acceptable. If SOCIAL_MEDIA_X shuts it down, it sends a message that it's not socially acceptable.

The rate of cigarette smoking among young people has dropped dramatically over the past few decades. This isn't because of any change in scientific finding, we've known cigarettes are harmful and cause cancer for decades prior to that. What changed is we stopped advertising them on TV and putting cigarettes in kids cartoons and movies. We stopped letting people smoke them in restaurants/airplanes/schools/hospitals/etc. Cigarettes became uncool, became socially unacceptable.

In one generation, smoking went from the coolest thing you could do to one of the least cool things you could do. Because it was made abundantly clear that it wasn't socially acceptable anymore, and that message was sent by banning smoking from public view.

anarazel9• 8 years ago

It's not realistically possible to challenge them. If you do, you'll be brigaded for weeks (hopefully just online). And a lot of it is not exposed to anybody challenging their views, but largely just to people at least vulnerable to their views. Look at the twitter feed of journos, especially female jewish ones, that have tried to report anywhere close to something in that area.

De-platforming by very central actors (In order of my currently perceived descending danger: tld operators, credit card companies, payment processors, end-user dns registries, hosting platforms) is dangerous, but so is just letting entities like gab, the daily stormer etc continue largely unchallenged.

archagon• 8 years ago

I am exhausted from having these people be in constant sight over the last two years. Hate speech is a fire that feeds on emotions, and there seem to be a lot of feelings in the air these days.

panarky• 8 years ago

ostracizing these people is not equivalent to eliminating hate

Eliminating hate is impossible, so that's not the goal.

It is possible to reduce the percentage of people who are consumed by attacking others with words, memes, threats and violence.

Isolating them reduces their reach and reduces their reproduction rate so that their numbers decrease.

Ostracizing works.

forgottenpass• 8 years ago

It's funny how [...]

It's an entirely mundane and predictable consequence when the free-speech branded platform is not already the market leader.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centrali...

eriken• 8 years ago

Is there a large enough presence of "non deplorables" on these sites to worry about unnecessary and unintended polarization due to these purges?

beobab• 8 years ago

Your use of the phrase "non deplorables" suggests that polarization exists outside those sites.

nailer4• 8 years ago

Honestly: no. I'm a classical liberal and a long time Twitter user, and I intensely dislike Twitter's recent move to the left (Peter Fonda making death threats against the president, Sarah Jeong making a massive series of racist tweets, and Louis Farrakhan comparing Jewish people to termites, all still having Twitter accounts) but gab doesn't appeal since I don't want to be in a right wing vacuum either.

Currently Twitter with a long list of block words is about the best I can get.

claudiawerner• 8 years ago

As someone on the other side of that, I have to agree with your strategy; I'm on the far-left side of Twitter (about as left as it gets) and although my list of blocked words is short (usually to get rid of right-wing posts but liberal ones too sometimes), it's the best I can do without moving to a much smaller platform.

DanAndersen2• 8 years ago

Also potentially relevant to the tech community here and anyone who works on currently-non-dominant social media platforms: politicians are already demanding that Gab be held criminally liable for the speech and actions of their users.

From Howard Dean [0]:

You are a facilitator of neo nazis and other haters. You should be tried for being an accomplice to murder. You’re lucky shutting you down is all you get.

[0] https://twitter.com/GovHowardDean/status/1056710782342311938

someone4542• 8 years ago

Gab can reasonably claim safe-harbor over this. If they are not censoring user’s posts, then they shouldn’t be held liable.

Go-Daddy is 100% within their rights to kick Gab off of their service. But silencing certain speech is not, in my opinion, a smart way to prevent atrocities like this in the future.

Cthulhu_2• 8 years ago

Safe harbor only goes so far; free speech is a thing, yes, but inciting hate and violence is iirc still illegal (IANAL), and if they had gotten reports from it or they could reasonably know about that behaviour on their platform, they can be held liable.

candu• 8 years ago

As summarized in [1], whether or not they should be held liable is still up for discussion. How the law works and how it should work are two different things, the latter being subject to continuous debate.

IMHO, we can at the same time hold that Gab should not be liable for the actions (arguably) resulting from these posts, but that they have a legal responsibility to identify, report, and remove imminent incitements to violence.

For instance: one could argue that profiting from such incitements constitutes support / endorsement of said incitements. This is similar in spirit to the "business activity" approach mentioned in the above Wired article. One could also argue that failing to identify and report such incitements is negligence.

Are these commonplace interpretations of these legal terms? Perhaps not, but there are some signs of a general recognition that perhaps this should change. "Disruption" and "technology" are not valid reasons to shirk civic responsibility; if you cannot provide your service responsibly, perhaps you shouldn't provide it. After all, we demand the same of engineers who build bridges and contractors who repair houses - because there is demonstrable harm to be done by failing to exercise responsibility. What we're rapidly discovering is that demonstrable harm is equally possible in a digital realm; it makes perfect sense for our understanding of legal responsibility to be updated accordingly.

Also IMHO, while it is impossible to "silence" extreme hate speech like this, we should certainly try. The harder it is for neo-Nazis and other militant racists to self-organize, the better. By giving their ilk any kind of easily-accessible platform, we make it that much easier for atrocities like this to be supported, normalized, organized, etc. Sure, we should be very careful as to what we tar with the "militant racist" brush - but there are some very, very, very clearcut examples.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2017/01/the-most-important-law-in-tech...

woodruffw• 8 years ago

As I interpreted it, that tweet only mentions actions, not speech.

For consideration: Stormfront exists solely to incite neo-Nazis to violence, and its members have murdered almost 100 people (pre-2014, that number is likely higher now)[1]. I wouldn't be shocked or constitutionally worried by a criminal case against them.

When you consider that Gab is really just Web 2.0 Stormfront with extra dogwhistles ("free speech" instead of "murder the Jews/Muslims"), it's not all that surprising that criminal charges are floated.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormfront_(website)

patrickg_zill• 8 years ago

You know that site founder Don Black is an FBI informant, right? Sounds like the FBI needs to be investigated...

AlexandrB• 8 years ago

anyone who works on currently-non-dominant social media platforms

This is whitewashing what Gab is. Before they purged their twitter history in response to this crisis, Gab's Twitter account was more than happy to tweet and retweet anti-semitic vitriol and conspiracies themselves[1]. While Gab likes to claim they're an impartial social network and defenders of free speech, they are actively courting a specific, often anti-semitic audience on Twitter.

[1] https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1027671587825172480

bradleyjg2• 8 years ago

Congress could repeal section 230, bring back the republication doctrine, and hold online platforms civilly liable when the underlying content it itself civilly actionable.

But even as far as civil law goes, the posters themselves probably don't have any obvious liability, and under criminal law it's hard to see how they'd fall under either of the relevant extremely narrow exceptions to the First Amendment (incitement or true threat).

Unless the (former) politicians saying these things can plausibly garner the support of 2/3rds of both houses of congress and 3/4 of the states I don't see why we should pay much attention to their "demands".

_trampeltier• 8 years ago

I don't know Gab. But if they did something illegal, then the police should shutdown the service. Of course the hoster, Domain service or PayPal is free to choose there customer. But in my opinion it's a bad thing to shut down just somebody because somebody don't like there nose or mind.

In future, this will be in a cashless world, even more problematic.

vfclists2• 8 years ago

The proper thing to do for Gab.com is to become their own domain registrar, and the same goes for the Daily Stormer and Alec Jones.

The hosting issues and the potential DOS attacks they face can be handled separately.

dexen2• 8 years ago

The proper thing to do for Gab.com is to become their own domain registrar

...and payment processor & bank, and hosting provider, and internet access provider. Still could be blocked on DNS resolution level and IP routing level, so better build out alt-Internet while at it.

At some point it becomes more cost-efficient to skip the grind of fighting-or-building every service provider tier, and go lobby the legislators for some protections.

I, and many others, don't like Gab's speech, going by the 2nd hand accounts of it.

Which is exactly why it needs free speech protections from various pressure groups.

vfclists2• 8 years ago

The fact is that service providers in the desire to control content are distorting what an internet connection actually is in the courts, especially when that corporate shill Ajit Pai insists on claiming that internet providers are information service providers rather than providers of dumb pipes who are supposed to link the customers wherever they want to go.

Blocking at the DNS level and routing level is technically a breach of the contract with the customer, because an internet service is simply an agreement to connect your equipment to an IP address, and the providers are in breach of contract when they do that.

new_guy• 8 years ago

This is amazing free publicity for them. But what it really is is Torbas's exit. He'd never get acquired by SV so he's taking his donations and running.

GAB basically deplatformed themselves, they waded into the shooter debate by willingly handing over all their info to the Feds and then shouting about it and made such a stink that every company that deals with them had to distance themselves i.e 'deplatforming' them, there's zero reason for them to be offline now.

It's either publicity or an exit, or both.

pictur• 8 years ago

What does this site do? Is it one of the ridiculous free speech sites?

Gab.com goes down after GoDaddy threatens to pull domain

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