The Sad & Strange Case Of Gab: A Lesson For Those That Seek Decentralization

When talking about how Web 3.0 will be built on blockchain networks and decentralization, what are the reasons for making Web 3.0 in the first place? One of the stated reasons for achieving this is to remove the power that large, centralized companies have obtained over the past 20 years. Companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and others like them, have obtained incredible power over the functioning of the internet. The reasons for this usually either revolve around principle or because of incidents such as data breaches, mass data collection, privacy concerns, and governmental spying. These are all perfectly valid reasons and should not be discounted in any way whatsoever. However, what would happen if this centralized power was used specifically to silence and deplatform a person, group, site, or service? This is the current story of Gab, an Alt-Tech social media site founded by Andrew Torba in August, 2016. At this date in time, Gab has had its web hosts ban them, their DNS providers revoke (and threaten to revoke) their addresses, their payments services revoked, and their social media accounts on other sites banned. Though it hit its pinnacle in mid October, 2018, this has been an on-going struggle for Gab since its inception. This is not about politics or about specific ideological issues, nor about the political stances of Gab or the companies that banned them. This is about how external forces used their centralized power to attack Gab from all sides, and how Gab failed to adapt to the hostile environment they were operating in in order to evade their attackers. This is about what lessons those that seek decentralization must learn from what has occurred to Gab. This is the sad and strange case of Gab, a victim of centralized power abuse and of its own centralized demise.

(During the writing of this over the course of several weeks, more events happened that relate to the subject of this article. As such, while most of the article will revolve around the issues with Gab, the latter part of the article will include such incidents that have occurred on other sites and services as well.)

Gab is, or was, an alternative social media site based on the principles of free-speech, founded by Andrew Torba in August, 2016. Their unofficial/official slogan was, in fact, "Speak Freely." Gab has an interface not unlike that of Twitter and Minds, though with some differences. They have an upvote/downvote system to rank posts and act as a form of "liking" and "disliking," much like Reddit uses. Users could post 300 character posts that included, images, gifs, and links with previews. Initially, Gab launched as an in-development, beta service that required registration to access any content on the site. When the site fully launched and it left beta, it became open to the wider web to access and view the content on the site. As the development on the site progressed, Torba and the site developers added the ability to upload videos to the site, as well as the ability to live stream on the platform, albeit both requiring a $5 a month "pro" subscription. A "pro" subscription also gave users the ability to make posts up to 3000 characters long. Gab was built on the idea that there is no speech that is, or should be, censored, based on the ideas of the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Gab held to this commitment, only removing posts that was either directly violent or threatening towards an individual, instead opting to create a "Mute" system for individuals to selectively mute the users or content they did not want to see on the site. Gab had some good ideas, and they successfully capitalized on the ever more oppressive censoring and purging of other social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. Gab could easily have grown to compete with Minds and SteemIt, in terms of users, content, and engagement, had they continued down the path they first started on with the site. However, as development on the site progressed some fundamental flaws were formed, or never solved, that eventually spiraled out of control and helped lead to the troubles Gab now faces. Troubles Gab has faced for some time.

The first issues arose when the "Community Mods" of Gab were expelled by the site's admins. Community Mods on Gab were folks who had some moderating privileges on the site, though to what extent I must admit I do not know. The community mods were great people from everything I experienced. They helped newcomers get acquainted with the site, they helped answer questions or comments from people about the development of Gab, they helped pass along design tips and ideas to the site developers, and overall they helped keep the general sense of peace on the site. This occurred right around mid to late November 2016, right after the presidential election, and occurred with a rather large amount of drama and insolence on the part of the site's admins to the concerns of the site's users. This coincided with other social media sites implementing the first of several waves of purges of those on the "political right" from their sites (I hesitate to use the terms "right" and "left" when describing these issues, as what is right and left at this point has effectively lost all value and meaning in terms of describing political stances, and ultimately matters little, if any, to the point of what I am writing). It should be no surprise that Gab was able to capitalize on these purges, growing their user base significantly during this time. The removal of the community mods and the sudden in-flux of purged users from other social media sites led to a rather dramatic change in the makeup of the sites user base. This change caused the site to become far less civil in nature. Disagreement with the "common narrative" assumed by larger and larger portions of the user base could lead to being "dog-piled" by other users of the site. This is not to say that Gab was a horrible place, it was just a place where, more and more, toxic opinions would be spread around with little if any recourse for doing so. The mute function was an interesting idea, but as these issues spread, trying to expand what you wanted to be muted lead to being in an ever more quiet part of the site, much like brand new users would be after they joined. This kept up through 2017, with the site still consistently continuing to grow its user base through out the year. Gab's internal troubles, at least viewed as troubles by myself, might have stayed just that, internal, had things been different. However, their internal troubles would lead to external forces capitalizing on these issues, and using them as fuel to damage the site, in any way possible.

External trouble began for Gab when their app submission for the Apple App Store was rejected twice for differing reasons in December of 2016. At the time, they had also submitted an app to the Google Play Store, which was accepted. However, in August of 2017 their app for Android devices was suddenly pulled by Google, as well. Google's cited reason for removing their app was for lack of moderation and hate speech. To get around this, Gab made their Android app available for download directly from the site. A month later in September, Gab faced pressure and threats from its domain registrar to remove posts made by Andrew Anglin and his Daily Stormer. In August of 2018, Gab's web host provider at that time, Microsoft Azure, threatened to suspend the site for an extended period of time if they did not remove "hateful" posts by a disgraced former political candidate. On October 27, 2018, after a shooting at a Pittsburg synagogue, Paypal severed financial services for Gab, DoDaddy removed Gab's account from their services, and the blogging service Medium blocked Gab for no aforementioned reason. That same day, Gab's web hosting provider, Joylent, gave the site 48 hours to find a new host before their services would be severed. This happened because the shooter had a page on Gab where he posted anti-Semitic content. It should be noted, however, that the shooter also had a Twitter and Facebook page where some of the same content was posted as well, yet no negative attention was garnered by either site because of it, not like Gab received. On Monday the 29th of October, Gab went offline as they searched for a new web hosting provider. Gab came back online with a new web host, Epik, on November 4th.

What are the lessons that can be learned from what occurred to Gab, especially for the decentralized community? There are two key take-aways from what happened to Gab that are important for anyone building a decentralized service, especially one focused around social media. Two issues that compounded on each other to lead to the troubles gab has faced. Those two problems are: Internal and External. Internally, Gab is highly centralized, relying on one central form of governance over the affairs of the site. The site's code is all closed-sourced, and is all housed in a centralized location. Gab also lacks any real way to punish or harm fake, harmful, or just crap content. Gab has downvoting, but it serves no real function in regards to how a post is displayed to users, and was at one time removed altogether for a short duration until criticism of its removal forced the Gab admins to reinstate the ability. This lack of ability for the community at large to moderate posts through downvoting compounded with Gab removing the community mods to insure no content moderation could occur at all, save for what little bit violated Gab's terms of service for violence or threats. This lack of community moderation is quite different from other alternative social media services. Minds downvoting harms a post's ability to be seen on trending pages, as it makes the Minds automated content discovery avoid such posts. Whereas downvotes on Steem, the blockchain-based decentralized social network, directly harm the financial payouts to both the post author and the content curators that upvoted the post, and also harm the overall "reputation" of the post author. Both of these forms of community moderation work to disincentivize posting garbage content to those sites, without the need for direct moderation by mods or admins. As a result, the quality of content on those sites would appear to be a lot higher to the general user. Gab's refusal to offer such moderation to the site is one such reason the quality of content would appear so much lower, as there exists no way to "disapprove" of worthless or nasty content in a meaningful way.

The external problem for Gab is directly related, but not completely because of, the internal problem. Externally, Gab relies far too heavily on centralized web services to host its content, its financial services, and its DNS. Gab made itself an easy target for centralized censorship by larger established media and tech companies because of its refusal to decentralize. Gab could have solved these issues by decentralizing, even just a small amount. They could have adopted a model similar to Minds, where everything is open-sourced and not centrally governed in an authoritarian way. Gab could also have gone even further and truly decentralized to a blockchain-based network. They could have built their platform to use an existing network such as Steem. They could have also made their own blockchain network as well. Any of these methods would have made it far harder for larger tech companies, web hosts, and DNS registries to block and censor them. Decentralization makes censorship and deplatforming much more difficult, though maybe not totally impossible, to achieve the removal of a platform from the web or render it useless through revoking of financial privileges. This effect is compounded when that decentralization occurs with something like a blockchain that not only runs the social network, but funds it as well, such as Steem.

I think this is an important lesson for decentralized app (dApp) creators, and decentralized blockchain networks as a whole, to understand and comprehend what is at stake. I am sure some will quip something to the line of, "well, Gab had it coming, with all of that 'hateful' political speech on there" or, "I disagreed with the vast majority of what was said on Gab, so I do not care. Also I'm not building a political site/service/network, so I do not have to worry." To those that will surely think that, understand that politics is not the keystone issue here. It was simply a very easy way for centralized companies to attack a threat to their business model. If your service represents a threat to the existing model of an establish centralized system, you can bet you can and possibly will face a similar fate down the road sooner or later. Using politics as a means to achieve the censoring and deplatforming of a service is just in vogue right now, an easy scapegoat in an age of authoritarian political correctness, hostile social justice movements, and rampant moral aggrandizement.

(It is at this point in time I must say that some of the examples I'm about to give are sites/services I utterly loathe. Some I strongly support, like Bitchute, and others I can't stand, like The Daily Stormer. Again, this is not a political issue at its core. That may be the stated reason for some of the attacks on the sites, but it falls apart for others upon closer inspection.)

Gab is not the only service to face this kind of centralized attack against it. I previously mentioned The Daily Stormer as having been one of the causes of issues for Gab with external web hosts. The Daily Stormer faced its own massive deplatforming, in 2017, when it had all of its possible web hosts revoke service to it, and even had most major DNS providers revoke the site's address, including Google. This effectively means The Daily Stormer cannot exist on the normal internet, and as such it moved to operating on the Tor network. I would like to mention at this point that the way to counter something really awful and hateful like the Stormer is not to try and silence it to a dark corner of the internet where it can fester. It is to let what it stands for be aired publicly and shown to be wrong rationally and succinctly. Forcing the Stormer to the Dark Web only made countering the arguments there far more difficult, and therefore far more dangerous as a whole. I cannot stand Andrew Anglin or his Daily Stormer, but, I also recognize the power used to remove him and his site from the internet is frightening, to say the least. The closest one could come to becoming an "unperson," to use Orwellian terminology, is what happened to him, and the very fact that ability exists should send a chill down any content, dApp, service, or network creator. Other sites and services have faced issues as well from external service providers. Alex Jones and his InfoWars network had all of their social media accounts terminated within a single week in mid-2018, and also faced web hosting provider complaints as well. Recently, the peer-to-peer video sharing service Bitchute came under intense criticism from several large media organizations, the largest of which was The Guardian. The article written by a Guardian reporter directly attacked both Gab and Bitchute, unreasonably claiming both had outlandishly high numbers of "far-right" members on the platforms. This claim could be considered for Gab, but it would be difficult to claim with Bitchute, and was also an irrelevant claim with regards to how Bitchute operates. Because of these attacks, PayPal revoked their financial services Bitchute used to receive donations. Bitchute operates, at least partially, on the Steem network, so they do have the ability to receive funds outside of big financial institutions, however, this does not change what happened to them after intense, and unjust, media criticism.

The point for dApp and decentralized network creators is this, you can be targeted by external, centralized forces just as easily as Gab, InfoWars, or Bitchute. Just because you are not making politically oriented websites or services does not mean you would escape being targeted. Politically-motivated reasons are just easy ways to achieve the censoring and deplatforming of sites and services that pose a threat to a larger established, centralized organization. If an organization felt you posed too great a risk to their operations, then it would be easy to whip up a controversy about your site or service using baseless or inaccurate information. The reason could be political, economic, cultural, you name it. To elegantly quote Ayn Rand, "the concretes differ, the abstractions are the same." The concretes in this case are the reasons used to censor and deplatform a site or service. The abstractions are both the underlying intent and the final result.

Now I shall pose a question to those creating and working on decentralized dApps, sites, services, and networks. Could you survive organized attempts to censor, deplatform, and shutdown your decentralized creations? Could you survive what Gab, InfoWars, and Bitchute have had to endure? It is commonly said that decentralized networks are far harder to censor than centralized ones, and to this extent I do fully agree. However, it is when the rubber meets the road and your network, dApp, or service is put to the test that it can be truly said to be uncensorable. This is why this question must be asked, through all parts of the development of a dApp, site, service, or network. This is the question that could ultimately determine whether the decentralization of Web 3.0 can truly stand against the centralized forces of Web 2.0. This question is simple, but has severe ramifications for those that cannot answer it. This question is...

Could you survive?

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