Gab remains financially viable due to the Jobs Act of 2012, which has allowed it to raise $2M from two crowdfunding rounds handled by online broker StartEngine
Three months after a man radicalized on Gab.com killed 11 Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue, the social media website that has become … Tweets: @hatewatch and @michaelehayden Tweets: @hatewatch : How is Gab—the social media hub for white nationalists & neo-Nazis—financially viable, even after a man radicalized there killed 11 Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue? Our new investigation finds it's thanks to an Obama-era law & an online crowdfunding broker. https://www.splcenter.org/... Michael Edison Hayden / @michaelehayden : Gab still brims with hate, celebrations of domestic terrorism, and extremist organizing. The website is bleeding money but survives thanks to an Obama-era law and the crowdfunding company @StartEngineLA. @Hatewatch went deep into the site's financials: https://www.splcenter.org/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Gab spent late 2018 fighting for survival: after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter's history on the site drew national attention (the suspect aired his hatred there in full), mainstream hosting and infrastructure cut it off before it resurfaced on registrar Epik behind Cloudflare's shield (its domain migrated to Epik). The open question since has been money — how a platform most payment processors and advertisers avoid keeps operating.
The SPLC investigation answers it: the Jobs Act of 2012 lets Gab raise equity from small retail investors through online broker StartEngine, $2M across two rounds so far. That funding base helps explain the platform's subsequent momentum — SimilarWeb data later showed its traffic nearly doubling in H1 2019 (traffic grew almost 200% between January and July).
First-order effects
- Gab gains a capital channel that bypasses the venture firms and payment partners that shun it — StartEngine's broker status makes roughly $2M in retail equity the site's financial lifeline.
- Thousands of small investors are now direct shareholders in a platform publicly tied to the Pittsburgh attack, with the SPLC naming both Gab and StartEngine in its reporting.
Second-order effects
- Other deplatformed services can copy the playbook: Jobs Act crowdfunding offers extremist-adjacent sites a financing route that does not depend on conventional tech investors or ad revenue.
- Crowdfunding brokers face a reputational and compliance test — StartEngine's handling of Gab rounds puts equity-crowdfunding platforms in the position of gatekeepers they were not designed to be.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, banned platforms survive by assembling parallel stacks — alternative registrars like Epik, shielding intermediaries like Cloudflare, and retail crowdfunding — reducing the leverage of mainstream infrastructure providers over who stays online.
- Regulators will eventually have to reconcile the Jobs Act's democratized-capital intent with its use by platforms under hate-speech scrutiny, a tension the SPLC investigation is forcing into the open.
The trend: Fringe social networks are building self-contained financing and infrastructure ecosystems — retail crowdfunding, friendly registrars, shielding CDNs — that let them survive deplatforming campaigns.