Before Robert Bowers allegedly opened fire at a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday, few had heard of Gab.com, the two-year-old social-media site where he apparently posted anti-Semitic and Holocaust-denying messages. Now it is at the center of a renewed debate over what online platforms can and should do to act on hate speech, with the site’s founder pledging that it won’t be sidelined.
“Gab is not going anywhere,” said Andrew Torba, Gab’s founder, in a post on Gab on Saturday. “I don’t care what we have to do, I don’t care what it takes.”
Torba boasted in his post on Saturday that, “We have probably the most traffic we have ever had.”
The remarks came as Torba said a cloud-services company had stopped hosting Gab. Payments firm PayPal Holdings Inc. PYPL, -3.01% also said on Saturday that it had canceled Gab’s account, and was in the process of booting Gab before the shooting on Saturday.
Gab, popular on the alt-right, said in a post on its verified Twitter account Saturday night that it also expected online-payments firm Stripe Inc. to ban it, citing what it said was a message from the firm. Stripe declined to comment.
An expanded version of this report appears on WSJ.com.
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