Gab Has Gone Full Shit Show Virtually Overnight

A couple days ago, Andrew Torba (CEO of Gab) announced he had paid America First (AF) $20k to attend their upcoming conference. This upset quite a lot of long-time Gab users and donors. Most I saw felt the leader of AF, Nicholas J. Fuentes, is a grifter and that their money they gave Gab was being thrown away. Others didn’t want their money going anywhere but the site. Still others wondered why AF didn’t invite Torba to speak for free given that both are supposedly free speech champions and it would be mutually beneficial to do so.

Many stated they were ending their pro memberships as a result. The brouhaha went on all day yesterday and escalated last night when Joe Prich’s live stream got booted from DLive after it was mass flagged. Prich is one of the ones upset with Torba’s decision. I follow Prich on Gab but do not listen to his live streams. I’m assuming the mass flags came from followers of Fuentes and most others see it that way too.

It further escalated today when followers of Fuentes started trolling saying they wanted to rape and kill women. Meanwhile, Torba wasn’t making any statements. Then reports started coming in of people being automatically unfollowed from Prich and others. The reports Prich made seem legitimate. Prich also lost 500 subscribers overnight from his gab.tv channel. This followed some reports of users being shadowbanned yesterday. I couldn’t verify the shadowbanning because I don’t follow those users.

I have some thoughts on this because I had planned on purchasing a lifetime pro membership at the beginning of February, less than a week away. Torba giving money to AF concerned me, as I would prefer my money to go back to the site, but I decided to have a wait-and-see attitude at that time.

Prich’s live stream getting booted further concerned me because it meant that a troll army was monitoring the Gab situation and targeted Prich. This is something I have left other sites over even though my social media accounts had never been a target of them.

Of grave concern to me is the accounts losing followers. This is Twitter-level bullshit and it means Torba has directly aligned himself with Fuentes and the trolls. Torba and Gab are now no better than Dorsey and Twitter were. Needless to say, I won’t get a pro membership. My interest in the pro membership was to have a GabTV channel. Now I may as well have a YouTube channel. I also wouldn’t be surprised if Torba has sold out profile information to America First. I suspect the code changes made to Gab a week or two ago that killed the site temporarily was to implement shadowbanning and unfollowing code in anticipation of the past couple of days.

As of the time of this writing, Torba addressed the GabTV subscriptions being lost, saying:

Torba has not addressed the Gab accounts themselves losing followers and people having to follow again.  I joined Gab in later 2016 or early 2017 for a brief period of time. It seemed like the only people on Gab were a bunch of people saying they hated Jewish and black people. I dropped my account. Now, the future of Gab appears to be a bunch of America First supporters (“Groypers”) saying they want to rape and kill women. This is a train wreck after having had a very positive experience on Gab for the past year. I won’t drop my account…yet, but I suspect I’ll be using Gab less and less.