The official news blog of Gab, a social network, run by founder Andrew Torba, covering its disputes with payment processors, app stores and governments.
HN links it as Gab's own account of being banned by Visa, PayPal, Apple and Google, in threads about moderation and payment processor power.
>Featured in a recent newsletter by Andrew Torba, the CEO and co-founder of parent company Gab AI, the video, down to its title, perfectly expresses Gab’s editorial line: a mix of faux expertise (Paul is a former eye surgeon), populist outrage, and selective analytical insight that invariably lands in a place where the elites are lying to you, America has lost its way, and white Christian values are under attack. The video also signifies Torba’s own rising profile as a right-wing, Christian (he signs all of his newsletter posts “Jesus is King”), conservative tech mogul, one who seeks to create his own alternative technological and epistemological universe, free of Facebook-deputized fact-checkers, interventionist government bureaucrats, and censorious liberal tech companies.
There was no link to the video in this article.
Is there proof that Torba said "white Christian values are under attack"? Did he even say "white" in the video at all? I doubt it.
Today, Torba responded to similar characterization by NYT and WaPo: https://news.gab.com/2021/08/23/hit-piece-on-gab-falls-flat-makes-gab-look-based/#more-3043
Here we have 3 journalists who together are so desperate to turn public opinion against this man that they must lie and evoke the tired old white supremacist Christian trope.
Most content moderated by most sites isn't strictly illegal. On Hacker News you can be modded down for being impolite, or insufficiently substantive, for mere disagreement, for being repetitive or any number of reasons including "just because," since there are no real guidelines for voting here, and people tend to use flagging as a "super downvote" rather than for content that just violates the ever increasing list of guidelines.
The number of sites that limit moderation to strictly illegal material are few and far between, and they tend to degenerate into cesspools where only the worst elements prefer to gather. Even Gab recently learned this lesson[0,1].
[0] https://news.gab.com/2024/03/were-cleaning-up-gab-and-its-long-overdue/
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39686704
It’s when all major payment processors collude to prevent money from reaching certain businesses. Since they’re essentially a small set of players constituting a duopoly (Visa and MasterCard) or oligopoly once you pull in the other players, there’s not much you can do about it. Their power constitutes a threat to freedom of speech, since they’re also commonly targeted by activists to “deplatform” those they disagree with.
The big example is when the credit card companies blocked Wikileaks in 2010: https://www.rawstory.com/2010/12/mastercard-visa-licenses-revoked-iceland-wikileaks/
A more recent example from 2020:
https://news.gab.com/2020/06/26/social-credit-score-is-in-america-visa-blacklisted-my-business-and-my-family-for-building-gab/
Gab is made by a Polish Guy. Andrew Torba. Here is an article he wrote:
Social Credit Score Is In America: Visa Blacklisted My Business and My Family for Building Gab
https://news.gab.com/2020/06/26/social-credit-score-is-in-america-visa-blacklisted-my-business-and-my-family-for-building-gab/
Him talking about the migration to Gab
https://tv.gab.com/media/5ff8989c87e3f385144ad67e?viewKey=707b77f0-105d-43c6-8f7b-e0fb4124b72b&r=1080p
it's not a free society. there are lots of laws and regulations in place. Saying this is a free country is a useless platitude.
Gab (twitter alternative) was just blacklisted by Visa last week. There is no recourse. What, should these people build their own consumer credit company too?
https://news.gab.com/2020/06/19/gab-blacklisted-by-visa/
Gab.com has been banned by PayPal, Visa and MasterCard: https://news.gab.com/2021/08/an-alternative-to-paypal-is-coming/
Free speech, no matter how disgusting, is constitutional in the US. This is a legal use case of crypto.
Another is micropayments for content or for upvotes with Lightning Network, for example https://stacker.news