Gab’s Statement On The Website Targeting U.S. Election Officials

At 8:38pm on Wednesday December 9th Gab received an email from Walden Macht & Haran LLP notifying us of a Gab account, @EnemiesOfThePeople, that was in breach of our Terms of Service.

The Gab account was created just a few days ago and featured the personal addresses, photos, and more of election and government officials, which is against our terms of service. The account also made direct threats of violence towards these individuals, which is against the law as well as our terms of service.

This type of content has no place on Gab and we have a longstanding history of zero tolerance for illegal behavior. At Gab we believe that free speech and open discussion are the best ways to solve problems and disagreements, not violence.

Within minutes of receiving the email alerting us to the existence of this account we took immediate action by backing up the account information for law enforcement and then terminating the account from our service.

We took it one step further by alerting the Gab community to this behavior and noted that our community members should report this type of illegal activity to our moderation team immediately if they come across it.

At 9:34pm, less than an hour after being alerted to the existence of this account, our attorney replied to Walden Macht & Haran LLP to let them know that we took immediate action to terminate the account.

At 3:49pm Thursday afternoon Reuters published an article covering this story and neglected to reach out to Gab for comment before publication. In the story Reuters falsely claimed that the account remained active on Gab even though it had been suspended within minutes of it being brought to our attention the night before.

We have since sent the following retraction request to the editor of Reuters as well as the three “journalists” on the story. We believe it’s important to transparently lay out the order of events here to highlight how “journalists” recklessly print whatever they want without fact checking or asking the subject of a story for comment on the matter at hand.

First of all gentleman why is that we were not contacted for comment on this article? Is it standard practice at Reuters to not contact the subject of a story for comment before printing? This is the second occasion where we have not been contacted for comment by your “reporters” who mention us in a story. 

Secondly, I demand an immediate retraction for your false claim that this account “remained active on Gab” as of Thursday morning. This is verifiably false and we have concrete evidence to prove that we suspended this newly created account for violating our terms of service within minutes of being contacted by Mr. Krebs’ attorney late Wednesday night.  

Finally, I plan on highlighting your disgusting “journalism” on Gab News in our media transparency section, which is emailed to and read by millions of people daily. My one post will receive more views and shares than the next ten you publish in that rag you call a news organization. 

You people are sick.

Hi Andy, no your article it is not accurate.

We suspended this second account yesterday morning shortly after it was created and long before your article was published.

Clear your browser cache. Basic account info like cover photo, etc are cached so you’re going to still see some elements being served even when a Gab account is suspended until the cache clears. 

If you had reached out to us for comment before publishing, you would know this. 

We also have our community of millions of people actively scouting the site and watching for anyone sharing content from this website on ours so that we can immediately remove and take action on it, which we did several times yesterday. Is Twitter doing the same? Or did you just give them the benefit of the doubt after suspending the first account, unlike the way you treated us. 

Our email exchange is being added to this story I published on Gab News yesterday and will be emailed out to millions of people this afternoon. It will get more reads than anything you publish in the next month combined as soon as I click the send button.

We The People are the news now. 

Learn to journalism and issue a correction immediately. 

Andrew Torba
CEO, Gab.com
Jesus is King

Brian is it part of Reuters “ethics and standards” to not reach out to a company or person that is being written about for a statement before publication? You had three people on this story and not one of them thought to reach out to us for comment?

This is the second time something like this has happened with your “reporters.” We had several other outlets reach out to us about this story and they reported it accurately because they did so. 

These accounts are not “active.” If they were active they would be able to sign into their account and post. They cannot, because they have been suspended. They were and are being suspended immediately and we are proactively searching for and removing them. Even with a cached suspended account there is no feed content displayed, just a cover photo and basic info that remains until the cache is fully cleared across the internet. Not just on any one individual computer. 

Again this really makes no difference to me because hundreds of thousands of people have already read our side of the story and will continue to throughout the day as emails go out.

Get your act together over there.