slate "The Internet of Hate"

[NRaleighLiberal]

https://slate.com/technology/2017/08/the-alt-right-wants-to-build-its-own-internet.html

by April Glaser

After Charlottesville, Nazis, white supremacists, and the alt-right have become a lot less welcome on the web. So they’re building their own.

AUG. 30, 2017 COVER STORY

The social network Gab.ai started in August 2016, three months before the world changed. The timing was not a coincidence. Founded in San Mateo, California, by onetime Silicon Valley–based Trump supporter Andrew Torba, a former ad-tech CEO, the network was initially built by just four people and with no outside investment. Torba, who was once kicked out of the influential startup accelerator Y Combinator for violating its harassment policy, had grown frustrated with what he described to BuzzFeed as the “entirely left-leaning Big Social monopoly” that decided what news deserved to be trending and what did and did not count as harassment on the internet. Now, a year later, Gab has more than 240,000 users and has raised $1 million via crowdfunding, which it celebrated with a middle-finger tweet to “Silicon Valley elitist trash.”

Branded with the face of Pepe, the anthropomorphic frog that has become the emblematic meme of the alt-right, Gab is a digital playpen for Nazis, white supremacists, men’s rights activists, anti-PC crusaders, Gamergaters, anti-feminists, free speech absolutists, and anyone who loves a solidly offensive joke. Notifications are sounded with the croak of a frog. If an anti-Semitic or racist or sexist remark isn’t the first post you come across, it’s likely the second, third, or fourth. It’s a “safe space” for the kinds of people the rest of us want to feel safe from. The users feel their perspectives have few homes elsewhere on an internet shaped by the left-tilting values of Silicon Valley, the rejection of which has propelled Gab’s rise.

On Aug. 17, the week after Nazis and white supremacists marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, and two days after Gab’s first anniversary, Google booted Gab from its app store.

The internet’s gatekeepers are now kicking out whole organizations.
That made Gab only the latest in a recent spate of online offings. In the past few weeks, American hate groups have found themselves being shut out of the internet, where for years they’ve gathered, growing into thriving and increasingly organized communities online. The gutting began before the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, when companies like Airbnb and Facebook booted some of the event’s organizers from their platforms. After the weekend turned deadly and scenes of white-supremacist mobs marching in the streets saturated social media and television, more online businesses began to kick neo-Nazis off, too.

snip - much more to read - long, interesting article

[BootinUp]

1. All they have is hate times a million

I'm sure that will do them in eventually.