The Balkanization of Social Media

Yesterday a journalist from the New York Times reached out to me about a story he was working on regarding social media companies that cater to either the left or the right. Following the election many left-wing users of X are leaving the platform and migrating to platforms like Bluesky and Facebook’s Threads platform as alternatives. I’ve been predicting and writing about what I have been calling the balkanization of social media for many years now and it seems that this trend is starting to accelerate. 

The rise of the free speech ecosystem on the right started out of necessity. We were told that if we didn’t like the ambiguous terms of service, censorship, and selective promotion of left-wing ideals on mainstream social networks that we could “go and build our own.” So that’s exactly what we did. We quickly learned that the left wouldn’t simply leave us alone to build our own social media ecosystem in peace though. 

Left-wing journalists and extremist organizations like the ADL spent the past eight years smearing our platform and community. Cloud hosting providers, app stores, payment processors, and even banks banned us from using their services. None of this stopped us, in fact it made our ecosystem more resilient and robust. Now instead of simply having our own social network we have our own payment processors, hosting services, AI tools, commerce platforms, and much more on the way. 

Gab is undoubtably the central node and tip of the spear in this movement that started back in 2016 when we launched. During the mass wave of censorship by Big Tech platforms following Donald Trump’s first election, Gab was the single social network on the internet to have a first amendment terms of service. When Parler went down because of their dependence on Big Tech infrastructure Gab remained strong and exploded in growth thanks to us having our own in-house servers. 

Gab remains the gold standard of free speech online. This allowed our users to get access to information about Covid, the vaccines, the election of 2020, and many other topics that were–and still are– being heavily censored across every other social network on the internet. We also shared messages from Donald Trump on a Gab account that we reserved for him with millions of followers while he was banned from all of the Big Tech platforms, which helped keep the Trump movement alive and informed while he built Truth Social. 

After the results of 2024 we are seeing a similar pattern emerge on the left with many left-wing users flooding to platforms like Threads and Bluesky. I think this trend will continue in the coming years. We are entering a period of fragmentation and balkanization with social media. As traditional news media continues to decline, fragmented values-aligned social networks are taking the place of the likes of Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, etc. Similar to how consumers watch multiple channels they will also use multiple platforms like Gab, X, etc. The period of consolidation in social media is over. The period of fragmentation has just begun. 

It’s so funny to me that Chris Wallace, who recently announced that he is leaving CNN, and other mainstream media talking heads think they can just start a podcast and the CNN audience will just magically follow them. That’s not how this works. People are watching Rogan and others because they seek to speak the truth and actually have talent. Don Lemon averages like 15k views per video on his Youtube channel because no one cares what he has to say. Tucker is an exception because he actually has talent and also seeks to speak the truth. These mainstream media people fundamentally don’t get it and never will.

Gab is arguably the most well positioned company for this period of social media fragmentation. Many people wrote off Gab after Elon purchased Twitter, but all that Elon has done is normalize and mainstream free speech social networking for us which has caused our traffic to more than double since his acquisition. At around the time he bought Twitter our traffic was hovering at around 20 million unique visitors a month, now it’s at 52 million a month. 

I’ll also note how Elon is parroting many of the undeniable truths I’ve been highlighting myself for eight years now. Frankly, I can’t stop smiling. Never could I have ever imagined back in 2016 when I launched Gab that the richest man in the world would be noticing and pointing out the same things I do or that he would normalize and mainstream a movement that Gab started from my humble cabin in the middle of the woods. 

The right will continue to use our own tools and ecosystem to mobilize. Nothing and no one can stop us. The movement is now too big and has too much momentum to be stopped. We’re going to use these tools to see to it that the people have the ability to speak their minds and gain access to the truth that the postwar liberal regime so desperately wants hidden from them. 

The future is bright and I want to thank all of you for helping Gab get to this point over the past eight years. We would not be here if it were not for the people in our community who upgrade to GabPRO, make donations, run ads on our site for their businesses, and purchase merchandise from the Gab Shop.

Thank you for making this possible and know that we’ve only just begun. 

Andrew Torba
CEO, Gab.com
Christ is King

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