A little more than a week after a white supremacist rally in Charlottesvilla, Virginia turned deadly, Google has announced that it is banning a chat app used by many on the fringes of American politics.
Gab is the social media platform of choice for members of the alt right and white supremacist communities who are no longer welcome on Twitter. Bearing a green frog logo reminiscent of the Pepe hate symbol it boasts such users as Daily Stormer editor Andrew Anglin, former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos and “Weev” Auernheimer, who is notorious for remotely printing swastika flyers off of networked printers at seven universities across the United States.
In a post on Twitter last Thursday, the app’s developers announced that it had been banned from the Google Play Store, the online repository of games, apps and content for users of Android powered smartphones for “hate speech.”
In a statement to the technology news website Ars Technica, Google explained that “in order to be on the Play Store, social networking apps need to demonstrate a sufficient level of moderation, including for content that encourages violence and advocates hate against groups of people.”
Describing itself as a "a "social network for creators who believe in free speech, individual liberty, and the free flow of information online,” Gab’s content guidelines ban threats and child pornography but not racist or discriminatory posts, Ars reported.
The social network’s terms and conditions explained its "mission is to put people and free speech first. We believe that the only valid form of censorship is an individual’s own choice to opt-out.”
This is not Google’s first move to combat extremism in recent months. In late June, the search giant announced in a blog post that it would take a series of steps to minimize the presence of terrorist content on its YouTube video platform, including devoting additional engineering resources toward developing technology to automatically identify “extremist and terrorism-related videos,” such as the “glorification of violence.”
According to recent research by the World Jewish Congress, an anti-Semitic post is uploaded to social media every 83 seconds. More than 382,000 anti-Semitic posts were posted to social media platforms over the course of 2016. The WJC survey, conducted by the Israeli monitoring firm Vigo Social Intelligence, also determined that an overwhelming 63 percent of all anti-Semitic content online can be found on Twitter.
