Gab is an English-language social media website known for its far-right userbase. The site has been widely described as a "safe haven" for extremists including neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and the alt-right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network)
The site was launched in 2017 and claimed to have almost 1,000,000 registered user accounts by July 2019. It has been noted to attract far-right and alt-right users and groups who have been banned from other social networks. The platform populace is primarily "conservative, male, and Caucasian". As of 2018, the site's most-followed users included high-profile, far-right figures such as Richard B. Spencer, Mike Cernovich, and Alex Jones. Gab recognizes far-right websites such as Breitbart News and InfoWars as competitors, according to a March 2018 financial filing.
Gab claims to stand for free speech and individual liberty, though these claims have been criticized for being a shield of the alt-right ecosystem. Antisemitism is a prominent part of the site's content, and the platform itself has engaged in antisemitic commentary. Researchers have written that Gab is "known to be hateful". The site gained extensive public scrutiny following the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in October 2018, as Robert Gregory Bowers, the sole suspect, posted a message on Gab indicating an immediate intent to do harm before the shooting. Bowers had a history of making extreme, antisemitic postings on the site. After a backlash from hosting providers, Gab briefly went offline.
In February 2019, Gab launched Dissenter, a browser extension and website that allows Gab users to make comments on content hosted on any website via an overlay visible only to those logged into Dissenter or using the extension, and thus bypass their individual moderation practices. In April 2019, Dissenter was removed from the Firefox Add-ons website and the Chrome Web Store for violation of their policies. In July 2019, Gab switched its software infrastructure to a fork of Mastodon, a free and open-source social network platform. Mastodon released a statement in protest, denouncing Gab as trying to monetize racism under claims of free speech.
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How Telegram became a safe haven for pro-terror Nazis
Several dozen groups are disseminating white supremacist propaganda and videos of lynches and shootings
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/hope-not-hate-telegram-nazis
Totally encrypted and largely unmonitored, the messaging app Telegram was created to provide uncensored communication between citizens of autocratic countries. Unfortunately, while it counts hundreds of millions of users, the platform has grown most infamous as a safe-haven for terrorists. Now, a new report from the political action group Hope not Hate has found that the platform is playing host to several dozen Nazi channels.
These public and private chat groups, which post predominantly in English or Ukrainian and are predominately US-based, with a handful of UK groups, dub themselves the “Terrorgram”. The groups are highly interconnected, often reposting content from each other’s channels. They draw influence from existing far right terror groups like the Atomwaffen Division, the now defunct Nazi webforum Iron March, and the writings of American Neo-Nazi James Mason. The groups disseminate white supremacist propaganda, videos of lynches and shootings, survivalist and guerrilla training manuals, and instructions for manufacturing weapons, carrying out attacks and evading detection.
The groups also canonise other famous terrorists as “saints”. Murderers who have received this designation include David Copeland, the 1999 London nail bomber, Anders Breivik the perpetrator of the 2011 Utoya attack in Norway, as well as unexpected choices like the Islamist terrorist Omar Mateen. These posts often follow a particular aesthetic, known as “terrorwave”. This appears as, in the reports words, “red, white and black, the style often incorporates images of historical fascists, terrorists or paramilitaries wearing skull masks, alongside esoteric far-right symbols and simplistic slogans (such as “TRAITORS WILL HANG” and “RAPE THE POLICE”).”
The report’s author, David Lawrence, explains that though Telegram has long been used by the far right to communicate, there has been a noticeable surge in the channels and their numbers of users since the Christchurch massacre, on March 15, 2019. The report points to the Site Intelligence Group, which found that 80 per cent of a select sample of 374 far-right Telegram channels and groups were created between the March 15 massacre and October 30, 2019. The number of users in this community likewise increased, according to Site data published in the Washington Post: a sample of far-right channels created in May 2019 collectively increased their memberships by 117 per cent – from 65,523 to 142,486 by the end of October. The biggest Terrogram groups have accrued over 4,000 followers in under a year.
Another reason for this surge, the report explains, has been that many major social media companies have grown stricter, particularly after the far-right rally in Charlottesville. (In March of last year, for instance, Facebook said it was banning white nationalist and white separatist content from its platform.) These banned users often migrate to the comparative safe-haven of encrypted Telegram channels. “Telegram affords them far more privacy than they would get on other social media platforms,” explains Bharath Ganesh, a political geographer at the University of Groningen. “A private Facebook group can still be useful, but they know that Facebook will be monitoring that content.”
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