High-profile Trump-supporting Twitter users who were banned from the site for “targeted abuse and harassment” on Tuesday took to the invite-only, alt-right-heavy social network gab.ai on Wednesday to air their grievances and decry what they called censorship.
By the end of the day, verified users on the site, whose mission is to “put people and free speech first,” were warning against mainstream-media outlets that were trying to “infiltrate Gab” and cautioned users to “be careful, don’t interview with them, don’t give them shit.”
Former Business Insider CTO Pax Dickinson, who was banned from Twitter on Wednesday, posted a note directed at Twitter.
ADVERTISEMENT
“Dear Twitter, ACTUALLY, the phrase ‘do it faggot’ is a historic traditional meme of my people, and it has absolutely nothing to do with homosexuality,” he wrote. “Banning me for using it is a denial of my identity and is extremely problematic. I expect an apology.”
Dickinson was fired from Business Insider in 2013 for a series of tweets, including one in which he wrote “In The Passion Of The Christ 2, Jesus gets raped by a pack of n—rs. It’s his own fault for dressing like a whore though.”
He wrote the most upvoted post on the social network for Wednesday, a day Gab’s CEO Andrew Torba declared the site’s “biggest day yet.”
“The great purge is upon us. But Twitter could have purged the #AltRight BEFORE we memed a President into the White House. They didn’t because they never believed it was possible,” Dickinson wrote. “Banning us now is too little & too late, a futile gesture of impotence. Congrats fam. #MAGA”
Richard Spencer, the head of the white-supremacist National Policy Institute think tank, wrote on Wednesday afternoon that “journalists who report on the alt-right need to speak out against Twitter’s censorship.”
Spencer, who has called for “a white ethno-state on the American continent,” took to his YouTube page to opine what he called Twitter’s “corporate Stalinism.”
“I am alive physically but digitally speaking there has been execution squads across the alt-right,” he said. “There is a great purge going on and they are purging people based on their views.”
Later in the day, Spencer reposted a rallying cry from the pseudonymous account Ricky Vaughn, who was banned from Twitter last month.
“We should now regard Twitter an enemy territory. Do not expect to be able to build an account or brand,” Vaughn wrote in one of the most popular posts on gab.ai. “Treat it as fertile territory for raids and skirmishes.”
Prominent alt-right Twitter and Gab user MicroChip—who goes by a series of usernames on Twitter, like @WDFx2EU9, due to serial bans—posted Wednesday night warning users of journalists gaining access to the site.
“Hey folks, BuzzFeed is trying to infiltrate Gab, be careful, don’t interview with them, don’t give them shit. Just received a private message on Reddit from Charlie Warzel with BuzzFeed,” wrote MicroChip, whose bio shows the Laurie Halse Anderson quote “Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.”
In his post, MicroChip then tagged Gab CEO Torba, who was kicked out of the famed Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator this week for “speaking in a threatening, harassing way toward other YC founders.”
“All of you: fuck off. Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling bullshit and shove it,” Torba wrote in a post on the Y Combinator Facebook group this week. “I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a President into office, cucks.”
The final sentence of Gab’s community guidelines, under the heading “Wellbeing,” is this sentence:
“Try to be nice and kind to one another. We’re all human.”
