A look at Gab, the social network launched in August that has become a haven for the far right and now hosts 98K accounts
When the white nationalist leader Richard B. Spencer was suspended from Twitter recently, he hopped over to YouTube to address his supporters. Tweets: @shannoncoulter Tweets: Shannon Coulter / @shannoncoulter : These folks don't want to be free to speak. They want to be free to hate. http://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece is the earliest data point in a two-year arc of coverage: Gab launches in August 2016 with 98K accounts built largely on users pushed off mainstream platforms — Richard B. Spencer's move from Twitter to YouTube after his suspension is the template case, and boycott organizer Shannon Coulter frames the dynamic as speech versus hate rather than censorship versus freedom.
What follows validates the trajectory: by October 2018 Gab is where the Pittsburgh shooting suspect aired his hatred in full, prompting the Times to profile how it became the platform of choice for neo-Nazis and other extremists (how Gab became a home for extremists). It survives financially through two StartEngine crowdfunding rounds totaling $2M under the Jobs Act of 2012 (Jobs Act-enabled crowdfunding), then posts near-200% traffic growth in H1 2019 per SimilarWeb (its 2019 traffic surge) — meaning the small haven described here scaled into a durable parallel network.
First-order effects
- Twitter's suspension of Richard B. Spencer converts moderation actions into recruitment for Gab, whose 98K-account base is fed directly by enforcement on incumbent platforms.
- Mainstream platforms like YouTube become way stations, not destinations, for suspended users — each removal decision now routes audiences toward Gab.
Second-order effects
- Consumer pressure campaigns like Shannon Coulter's boycott raise the cost for mainstream brands of tolerating extremist speech, accelerating exactly the suspensions that drive users to Gab.
- Gab's dependence on equity crowdfunding via StartEngine means its survival rests on retail money rather than ad revenue, insulating it from advertiser boycotts that constrain incumbents.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, content moderation on major platforms structurally produces parallel, lightly-governed networks that concentrate the most extreme users — a splintering of the public sphere into moderated and unmoderated tiers.
- Crowdfunding rules written to help small issuers become a financing channel for platforms excluded from conventional venture capital and advertising, making deplatforming less fatal than it once was.
The trend: Platform enforcement against extremists is fragmenting social media into a governed mainstream and an ungoverned fringe, with Gab as the clearest early beneficiary.