CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
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 |  Subject: Gab Doesn’t Want Your Social Media Token — It Wants Bitcoin  Mon May 13, 2019 9:50 pm | |
| Andrew Torba is getting into Bitcoin.
Well, actually, he’s been into Bitcoin for quite some time. He contributed to CoinDesk back in 2013, most notably with an article he wrote about buying a Subway footlong with bitcoin.
This was three years before he founded Gab, an alternative social media network “that champions free speech, individual liberty and the free flow of information online.” Gab has accepted bitcoin donations since its launch in 2016, but now it’s getting even further into the original cryptocurrency.
Torba doesn’t just want to bankroll Gab with bitcoin; he wants to embed bitcoin into Gab’s design. So, Gab forked Basic Attention Token’s Brave browser to speed things up (among other reasons).
Free Speech MoneySince coming onto the scene in 2016, Gab has been something of a pariah among popular social media websites. This is mainly due to the clientele it attracts, namely, right-leaning patrons of various creeds and colors (with the alt-right community being of primary concern to detractors).
It has been described as “an echo chamber for right-leaning content dissemination,” though similar claims that it is unmoderated are overstated: the site prohibits doxxing, violent discourse and threats, child or other illegal pornography, and spamming, amongst other no-nos. Still, it has been highly controversial for its dogged defense of free-speech accommodation for far-right iconoclasts. For this, it has earned a title as a “far-right” alternative to Twitter.
Unsurprisingly, Torba sees it differently. He told Bitcoin Magazine that the site is fulfilling a much needed niche for “political dissidents and politically incorrect content creators [who] aren’t doing anything illegal.” These individuals are subject to a trend of disenfranchisement that Gab knows all too well, Torba said — that’s why it turned to bitcoin.
“Bitcoin is free speech money,” Torba continued. “Its censorship resistance is its greatest value-add in my opinion. It makes sense for the free speech company to support and use free speech money, but in our case we had no choice. We’ve been banned from every major payment processor, including all major crypto payment processors likes Cash App, Coinbase and BitPay.”
Along with Gab’s own financial restrictions, Torba lamented that the social deplatforming that individuals on the far right have increasingly experienced is reaching beyond the social realm and into the financial. Crowdfunding platform Patreon, for instance, banned highly controversial figures like Carl Benjamin and Milo Yiannopoulos in December 2018, prompting libertarian content creator Dave Rubin and psychologist Jordan B. Peterson to boycott the platform.
Yet again, this gives Bitcoin a chance to shine.
“We are going to see the censorship and no-platforming start to shift into banking and payment processing even more going forward, which is why bitcoin is so important and will remain important,” Torba said. “They have massive audiences who want to support them. There’s no reason they should have to ask for permission to engage in commerce on the internet between willing parties who are following the law.”
No Token NecessaryTo move toward a censorship-free payment avenue for its users, Gab had to rouse a bit more controversy first.
The platform announced in April 2019 that it had forked Brave’s browser. This was done, in part, because Dissenter, its browser plug-in that enabled comment sections on any website imaginable, was shunned by Firefox and Google Chrome. These bans coincided with the trend of Gab being blocked by major web hosts.
So Gab finally decided to launch its own browser by forking open-source Brave to create the Dissenter browser. JavaScript creator and Mozilla and Firefox co-founder Brendan Eich, who also co-founded the Brave browser and its token BAT, criticized the move as that of a “parasite.” Torba told Decrypt this response puzzled him, especially considering Brave “is a fork of the Google Chromium project” and that forks like his own are the point of open-source software.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/gab-doesn-t-want-social-134234938.html |
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