Gab Was Key To The Tree Of Life Massacre. Now Doug Mastriano Seems To Be Paying It For Followers.

[Nevilledog]

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Christopher Mathias
@letsgomathias
·
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New: Gab was key to the Tree of Life synagogue massacre. The site’s owner is a raging anti-Semite. The GOP nominee for PA gov, @dougmastriano, paid Gab $5k for “campaign consulting.” Now every new account on Gab automatically follows Mastriano.

huffpost.com
Gab Was Key To The Tree Of Life Massacre. Now Doug Mastriano Seems To Be Paying It For Followers.
The GOP nominee for governor of Pennsylvania paid the far-right platform a $5,000 “consulting” fee. Now, new Gab accounts are automatically following him.
6:19 PM · Jul 14, 2022

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/doug-mastriano-gab-andrew-torba_n_62d08787e4b02d3ecf3184b9


Mere hours after a white supremacist massacred 11 worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue in October 2018, Andrew Torba, CEO and founder of the social media site Gab, gloated about all the web traffic his platform was receiving.

“We have been getting 1 million hits an hour all day,” Torba wrote via Gab’s Twitter account. Gab had drawn national scrutiny immediately after the bloodshed in Pittsburgh because the killer, Robert Bowers, was a prolific and verified user of the site. He’d posted neo-Nazi propaganda and calls for violence against Jewish people, whom he called the “children of Satan.”

Bowers had often directed his ire at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a Jewish charity that helps refugees. He blaming it for trying to replace white people in America — an invocation of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people,” Bowers wrote on Gab two hours before he drove to the Tree of Life synagogue with an assault rifle and three handguns. “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

As the country reeled from the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history, Torba claimed Gab had a “zero tolerance policy” for violence. He argued that Bowers was an anomaly. This was false: Torba had actively recruited America’s most notorious bigots and antisemites to join Gab, advertising it as a less censorious alternative to Twitter and turning the platform into a fascist free-for-all. Even as Torba denied that Gab condoned violence, its users were celebrating the 11 dead Jews in Pittsburgh.

In the years since, Gab has remained a haven for hate, and Torba himself has grown increasingly antisemitic and racist in his words and behavior. “We’re building a parallel Christian society because we are fed up and done with the Judeo-Bolshevik one,” he tweeted last year, using a term popularized by the Nazi Party in the 1930s. In February, Torba was a featured speaker at a white supremacist conference in Florida, where he used “great replacement” rhetoric. (Other speakers at the event praised Adolf Hitler and called for Dr. Anthony Fauci to be hanged.) More recently, after a white supremacist gunman targeted Black people at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, killing 10, Torba implored his Gab followers to marry and reproduce with only white people.

*snip*

[Nevilledog]

1. Kick

[crickets]

2. The auto follow feature alone is appalling.

Torba's open anti-Semitism and racism is downright dangerous. Social media needs more supervision than it has gotten up to now, or it's going to kill this country.