Ah, Gab. The social media forum that boasts about being all for “free speech” and has become a haven for the alt-right and white supremacy is now going invite-only. Why? Apparently, it’s had a recent increase in bot accounts that have attacked the site’s infrastructure.
If you’re wondering where you’ve heard of Gab before, the platform became well-known after it was revealed that Robert Bowers, the mass shooter who murdered 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, reportedly had an account on the forum. Users of the site include alt-right darlings such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Paul Joseph Watson, and Alex Jones (of InfoWars), whose material has been banned from other social media sites including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
It’s not hard to find conspiracy theories, racist memes, or hate speech on Gab. With these bots on the site, it’s apparently not hard to find pornography, either. In the past, bot attacks have been responsible for tons of pornography (which violates Gab’s rules, unlike hate speech). While it’s not yet confirmed what the new influx of bots are actually posting (or if it’s simply their presence that’s foiling the site), here’s what Gab posted as an explanation to users:
Gab has made the decision to do a total and complete shutdown of open registration until we can figure out what is going on with the flood of spam and bot accounts attacking our community.
In the past 24 hours alone we have had over 50,000 bots join the site and automatically follow every user while also attacking our product infrastructure. We must be vigilant against these attacks on our community and will be shifting to an invite-only system until further notice.
The solution? Go invite-only. Notably, the only users who can invite “friends, fans, family” (can you imagine receiving a message like that?) are users who pay for their accounts. If you pay for an account, you’re a Gab Pro member.
It’s unclear how many paid members use Gab, or how many may transition from free to paid accounts due to this membership change. As reported by the Daily Dot, Gab was recently able to raise $1 million via a fundraising campaign on StartEngine. Before this, as reported by the Daily Beast, Gab saw a huge drop in revenue after the Pittsburgh shooting. Paid subscriptions dropped by 90 percent, and many payment processors didn’t want to work with the site. Its new payment processor is 2nd Amendment Processing.
Last year, Gab founder Andrew Torba explained via email to the Daily Dot that he believed people were “creating brand new accounts and spamming extreme and hardcore porn across the site, in violation of our spam and NSFW guidelines.” He went on to say he believed these spammers were “political actors.”
“We suspect it is a political activist group potentially being paid to do so. The reason we believe that they may be getting paid to do this is because of the sheer amount of time and effort they put into doing it. In this particular instance, this person has been doing this for months; often for 12+ hours a day, recreating new accounts and continuing to manually spam porn across the site.”
How much would you have to be paid to post anything on Gab?