Social media giants may be trying to squelch hate speech and conspiracy mongering, but alt-tech offers them safe space. As major social-networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have increased their efforts at moderation to crack down on hateful and extremist content, they have become less attractive to adherents of the far right. In response, new platforms belonging to the right-wing alternative-technology movement, or “alt-tech”, have emerged, offering themselves as a refuge or safe space for those who have been “deplatformed”, with the promise that even the most avid extremist can “speak freely”. One of the leaders of the alt-tech crowd is Gab, a social media platform launched in 2017. Largely modelled on the microblogging architecture of Twitter, Gab markets itself as the “free speech” alternative to what Gab CEO Andrew Torba calls the “left-leaning Big Social monopoly”. The offer of a platform with close to zero content moderation and marketed towards the right was quickly taken up by a broad range of far-right users: from Trumpian Republicans and right-wing libertarians to avowed neo-Nazis and QAnon conspiracists. (…) While many other alt-tech platforms have been taken off the web, Gab has remained online, and has grown in popularity despite being removed from both Apple’s App Store and Google Play and twice being deplatformed by its domain registrar. A critical element of Gab’s survival has been the platform’s ability to market and monetise a sense of persecution by “Big Tech”, targeting those banned from other social media platforms to “Get on Gab”. Gab has a large number of Trump supporters among its user base, who exist alongside (and often overlap with) more extreme elements such at neo-Nazis. In keeping with its marketing to those banned from other platforms, Gab tends to enjoy huge spikes in activity when its mainstream competitors change or enforce their terms of service. For example, the platform had an influx of users and activity following the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in August 2017, and again following the storming of the US Capitol on 6 January this year. A new kind of virtual community? What makes Gab distinctive is the way in which this sense of persecution or victimhood at the hands of “Big Tech” is made prominent on the platform and unites the various expressions of far-right worldviews inhabiting Gab. Victimhood claims have been elsewhere identified as part of a powerful affective bond in white-supremacist and broader far-right communities. Alongside “white victimhood”, a common narrative among far-right groups, there is a platform-specific sense of persecution underpinning far-right community formation on Gab. Users believe they have been unfairly targeted by mainstream social media, and have as a result of their views become the victim of a digital “purge”.
via lowyindstitute: Gab’s gift to the far right