In some ways, highly controversial content is worse than illegal stuff. If you’re running a forum to buy/sell stolen credit cards or a “stresser” DDoS service, you only have to worry about a court order. But if your site knowingly hosts racists banned from other platforms, one of your users goes out and has himself a massacre, and you decline to clean up your act, you may find yourself being dropped by upstream providers.
So it might be that even “bulletproof” providers wouldn’t touch Gab, now that their users jumped past being assholes and into mass murder. Then only Tor remains. Tor is way too slow for interactive browsing or downloading files, but would work perfectly fine for a Twitter clone.
Has a datacenter ever dropped someone over content?
You’d think that there would be plenty of international options. I’m sure many hosting platforms in Russia would be happy to provide both domain registration and hosting.
Are you talking about physical? I’m sure it’s happened.
Either way, They’ve raised at least 15M. That’s more than enough to build a datacenter and get bandwidth in.
Honestly, the solution might be to just go all out and build a datacenter with “free speech” attached to it. What’s gonna happen? insert red state here gonna come in and eminent domain the land?
They’re actively fighting the “russian bot” narrative. For obvious reasons, hosting in Russia would be a bad idea.
Additionally Russia doesn’t have free speech, so that’d probably be a bad idea.
Sure, if you violate their TOS. Usually for spamming, way back in the day. These days they use cloud-based VMs paid with stolen credit cards.
I thought the same thing about bulletproof hosts, but I mean, if one of your users actually kills a bunch of people, that’s a tough one even for a service targeting criminals. I mean there’s a big difference between stealing credit cards and even dealing hardcore drugs and mass murder.
Once again. You can’t make that claim when thousands of accounts on Twitter and Facebook broadcast evil and racist shit daily. Gab bans illegal content such as threats of violence. And so does Twitter and Facebook. I’m failing to see a difference here.
Yeah, I mean if they have $15 million, then I don’t see what the issue is other than they’ll be down for a while. If they can’t figure out how to turn $15 million into a functioning website, then it’s on them.
Perception matters. When you start a service specifically targeting people who got banned from other platforms, you are opening yourself up to criticism when one of them turns out to be not just a loser but a mass murderer.
I think it’s a matter of time. They’re probably working on something in the backend, but they probably just don’t want everyone to know about it.
Frankly, it would be better for them to say “Announcing the only datacenter dedicated to 1A! Come on over to Fort Worth, Texas and colo with Gab.datacenter!”
Who’s dealing hard drugs?
You keep bringing up mass murder, but you forget that this is the first mass murderer to have a Gab account. Tons more mass murderers have Facebook/Twitter/Youtube accounts. By that logic, you’re less likely to be a murderer if you’re on Gab. We should probably shut down Facebook, Twitter and Youtube so we can keep these murderers off the internet.
This isn’t just a discussion about domain registrars either. You have companies like Visa/PayPal/Square and others who have outright blacklisted websites from using their services. Effectively leaving the only option of crypto currency.
And even then places like Coinbase have banned accounts sent to websites or users that coinbase does not like.
That’s the thing. Lots of the people on there are banned for having a political view that disagrees with the silicon valley tech companies political views.
There are also tons of people on Gab who aren’t banned from those sites. I’m on Gab. I’m not banned from Twitter/Facebook (although, I voluntarily closed my facebook account)
Calling people banned for being conservative losers is exactly the kind of bad perception that’s polarizing the country. You’re either accepting of a wide range of political views (you don’t have to agree, just don’t hate people for it) or you’re part of the problem. Only fascists silence opinions they disagree with.
What do you want to do? Pass a law compelling companies to do business with gab? I understand that the nature of gab makes their operations more difficult, but not impossible.
