Gab’s Email Exchange With The Wall Street Journal

A former Facebook employee turned Wall Street Journal journalist reached out to me today digging into how Gab runs our business and manages to stay online despite being no-platformed by dozens of service providers over the years. Below is our full email exchange. I want you all to see how these people operate. The way they weasel and work behind the scenes. I also want you to compare this full conversation to what he actually publishes. Enjoy!

Hello,
I’m a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and I’m looking into how platforms with strong free speech policies are dealing with their dependence on large internet infrastructure companies (like Cloudflare). Would Andrew Torba be interested in participating in an interview?

Best,
Euirim Choi

My reply:

Dear Euirim,

Our free speech policy is not a policy of chaos. We are have user guidelines, namely: do not break US law, and we enforce them equally. Gab works very closely with U.S. and international law enforcement to keep criminal users and criminal usage off the platform.

We are very open about this policy, as we explain on our blog:
https://news.gab.com/2019/08/23/a-note-on-foreign-data-disclosures/

https://news.gab.com/2019/08/23/gabs-policies-positions-and-procedures-for-unlawful-content-and-activity-on-our-social-network/

As a result we see comparatively low levels of unlawful content compared to, say, your former employer Facebook. We believe our past deplatforming issues have more to do with Silicon Valley partisanship than the actual content on our site. 

Andrew Torba

His reply:

My reply:

Euirim,

Our content policies are our business. Viewpoint neutrality is the reason our business exists and the cause of every single business challenge we have endured and overcome. We will not provide answers as to how we have responded to this problem and frankly it’s an insult to my intelligence for you to think that I would divulge information about our infrastructure or business operations to a former Facebook employee, let alone a journalist.

If your readers are interested in the subject, they should be aware that every large corporation in the world which has no-platformed us – Apple, Google, Microsoft, PayPal, Stripe, Joyent, GoDaddy, Visa, and many more – is interested in suppressing not Gab’s speech, but the speech of millions of ordinary Americans and others from around the world who use our platform. 

We have approached several of the above companies directly and informed them that their denial of services makes it more difficult for us to police our platform for criminality and keep the public safe while we pursue our entirely legal free speech mission.

Some companies, such as Visa, have apparently defamed us by calling our suppliers and accusing us of illegal transactions. Others, such as Google and PayPal, know from our cooperation with the U.S. law enforcement community that we’re not a bad actor. They boycott us anyway.

In Microsoft’s case we have even asked simply to have access to PhotoDNA, which is an industry standard software that protects victims of sexual abuse. All of these companies have refused to even answer our e-mails. There’s no appeal.

We were told to “build our own” so that’s exactly what we did and it took years to accomplish. 

Companies like Parler toe the “woke” political line on so-called “hate speech,” so they’re allowed on the app stores. For now. We don’t, so we’re not. And we won’t, because our mission is to create a space online that permits the First Amendment to operate unrestricted, as-written, for political speech.

Big Tech is a petty group of partisan thugs who are willing to put the election of a Democrat ahead of public safety and the rights of American citizens.

This email exchange is going up on our blog and being emailed out to millions of people this afternoon. 

His reply:

My reply:

No, I’m not interested in that at all.

You are not my enemy because you interned for Facebook. I have plenty of friends who worked at Facebook. You are my enemy because you are a “journalist.” You have my statement, and now so do millions of others.

1 Peter 5:8 

If he replies again I will update this post and publish it here.

Andrew Torba
CEO, Gab.com
June 30th, 2020

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