Pittsburgh shooting: Gab drops offline after attack

A Twitter-rival used by the man accused of a gun attack on a US synagogue has gone offline after several technology services withdrew support from it.

Gab describes itself as a defender of "free speech and expression" with nearly 800,000 users.

It has faced criticism in the past for providing an outlet for far-right figureheads and conspiracy theorists banned from other social networks.

The service has said it has "zero tolerance" for terrorism and violence.

It has, however, acknowledged that a verified account whose details matched those of the alleged Tree of Life Synagogue shooter had been active on its service.

The account, registered to Robert Bowers, had posted several anti-Semitic messages on the platform. And in a final update had written: "Screw your optics, I'm going in," shortly before the Pittsburgh attack.

Gab said it was "ready and willing to work with law enforcement" and noted that the suspect "also had accounts on other social networks".

It said "high volumes" of criminal activity were present on other social media platforms.

And it specifically criticised Twitter for having hosted posts from anti-Semites and "Isis cells", adding no-one was calling for its competitor's closure.

Even so, some of the technology companies who have severed their relationship with Gab said they were uncomfortable with its behaviour .

Among them is PayPal, which banned the company from using its money-transfer service on Saturday.

"When a site is explicitly allowing the perpetuation of hate, violence or discriminatory intolerance, we take immediate and decisive action," PayPal said in a statement.

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Internet domain registrar GoDaddy also explained why it had given Gab just 24 hours to find another provider.

"In response to complaints received over the weekend, GoDaddy investigated and discovered numerous instances of content on the site that both promotes and encourages violence against people," a spokesman told BBC News.

Gab has reported that a further three technology companies, which have not publicly commented, had also banned or suspended it:

• Samsung-owned Joyent, which provides web-hosting services
• Stripe, an online payments processor
• Medium, the blogging platform, which Gab had used to publish a statement about the synagogue attack

In addition, Gab has suggested that Twitter might soon block it.

"Show the world that your TOS [terms of service] means nothing and your rules are enforced subjectively at will," it posted.

This is not the first time Gab has clashed with others.

Apple and Google have both banned its app from their stores and Microsoft stopped hosting the platform on its Azure cloud computing platform in September.

But Gab has said that it still has "plenty of options, resources and support" after the latest setback and is "working around to clock" to get back online.

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Ok, let me play the devil's lawyer role here. Apparently the progressives are attacking again. Usually people ask themselves, why can not you compete with the big ones like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Google ... well, here's the answer.

All these big companies have been used for real bad things, not just to say racist comments or any other kind, but Facebook has been used, and is used, by various degenerate people to rape people, for pedophiles to contact children, and for many other bads things. How many criminals, murderers and terrorists have an account in one of the big companies? I would say many.

However, large companies are not fined or censored collectively as Gab, who has just suffered a virtual blockade by all companies in the sector. The only censorship we can see on Facebook, Twitter, Google and YouTube, is the censorship promoted by a specific political agenda.

This subject, Robert Bowers, is just the bait here, the big companies are using a specific event to leave the competition out.

I can bet that both liberals and libertarians who love private monopolies like this standardized censorship that is being applied to Gab. But those of us who defend the free speech are not satisfied with this situation. It is possible that there are Nazis, fascists, communists, socialists and all kinds of derailed people there, but the idea is not to censor them, I am sure we can win with arguments and close their mouths with strong words.

It is incredible to see the double standards of Google, Facebook and other monopolistic companies, they are not protecting society at all, they are protecting themselves. They make me sick, they're just hypocrites.

Today is Gab, but tomorrow it can be easily Steemit or any other, whatever a threat to technological monopolies will pay a high price, and unless we do something, we are on the way to tyranny. We just can not be fooled by something like this, blaming a social network for what happened in Pittsburgh is simply irresponsibly naive.