Gab is an alt-tech social media platform that provides digital infrastructure to far-right extremist groups and their supporters, some of whom have been banned from mainstream social media platforms and payment processors for violating terms of service. The company’s founder and CEO, Andrew Torba, welcomes these groups and other well-known white supremacist activists onto Gab, amplifying their racist and antisemitic propaganda on his personal Gab account and on other social media platforms.
About Gab
Self-described as the “home of free speech online,” Gab has long served as a digital haven for the far right, including its most violent and extreme manifestations. The platform offers infrastructure for fundraising, sharing propaganda and recruiting to those extremists who have lost access to more mainstream social media channels and services for their bigoted beliefs or even involvement in violence.
Researchers, journalists and activists have criticized Gab for its seemingly lax approach to content moderation. Despite its prohibition on terroristic content, Gab has served as a home to violent neo-Nazi groups banned as terrorist organizations in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Robert Bowers, who was sentenced to death in 2023 for murdering 11 Jewish people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, regularly posted on Gab. The site has served as a home for a slew of prominent white nationalists, antisemites and other right-wing extremists. In the run-up to the Jan. 6, 2021, events at the Capitol, Gab users discussed strategies to overwhelm law enforcement and shared content with the hashtags “Storm the Capitol” and “civil war.”
Gab’s role with the far right extends well beyond permitting hateful and violent content on the site. Through his account on Gab and other social media platforms, Torba has promoted the work of white supremacists, antisemitic tropes and racist conspiracy theories including the “great replacement.” He has endorsed the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, writing in a Gab post on the day of the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, “In a system with rigged elections there are no longer any viable political solutions.”
Torba has endorsed a range of radical-right figures, including the pro-Hitler live-streamer Nick Fuentes. Torba spoke at Fuentes’ America First Political Action Conference in Florida in 2022 and has praised him as “a Civil Rights Hero of our time.” Alex Jones, an antigovernment conspiracy theorist, has praised Torba and welcomed him on his show. Lydia Brimelow, who runs the white nationalist website VDARE with her husband, Peter, has credited Torba with rescuing their site from financial ruin after she began using Gab’s in-house payment processor.
Torba has described Gab as a hub for what he calls a “parallel Christian economy.” He has expanded Gab from a social media platform to a network of offerings, including a streaming platform, Gab TV; an advertising service, Gab Ads; and its payment processor, Gab Pay. In 2022, Torba expounded on his vision for a “Christian nationalist” society in his coauthored book Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide for Taking Dominion and Discipling Nations. He has stated that his ideal Christian society would exclude Jews.
Despite Gab’s status as a fringe site, Torba has made some inroads with Republican lawmakers and aspiring lawmakers. Doug Mastriano, a QAnon supporter who ran an unsuccessful campaign for governor of Pennsylvania in 2022, paid Gab $5,000 for “consulting” services, according to a report from Media Matters for America (MMFA). Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., has also used the platform for advertising. Between 2021 and 2022, Greene paid over $37,000 to Gab for digital marketing, according to another MMFA report.
In their own words
“They target men with p*rn and sports, they target women with feminism and consumerism. They distract you both with an endless supply of dopamine hits in the form of vapid meaningless entertainment and bot-fueled social media likes all while importing your replacements from the third-world by the millions every year while you’re not forming families.” — Andrew Torba, in a post on Gab, Jan. 8, 2024
“No Jewish Kingdom has lasted more than 80 years [sic] white pill. We are on year 75.” — Andrew Torba, in a post on Gab in response to antisemite E. Michael Jones, Oct. 25, 2023
“Ten of millions of people have been socially engineered for decades to believe that you’re a racist if you don’t want to genocide your own race out of existence…Anti-white is now a common phrase among normie conservative influencers. CRT [critical race theory] is talked about constantly. The Great Replacement is talked about constantly.” — Andrew Torba, in a post on Gab, May 18, 2023
“Look at the fruits of what happens when we allow pagans, Jews, non-believers, atheists, to run our country, OK? What happens? What is the fruit of that? Well, the fruit of that is a massive inflation, a border invasion, billions and billions of dollars being set to foreign countries. You know, a suicide epidemic in this country. Deaths of despair. Fentanyl deaths skyrocketing. And just this laundry list of stuff, OK? So this is what happens when non-believers are in positions of power and run our government.” —Andrew Torba, in a video posted to Gab TV, July 25, 2022
“When groups like the ADL [Anti-Defamation League] attack me I can literally sense the demonic energy. They are spiritual vampires. The way you defeat them is by doubling down and proclaiming the name of Jesus Christ. Stand your ground, be not afraid. There is nothing demons fear more than the name of Jesus. Pray for me.” — Andrew Torba, in a post on Gab, Dec. 17, 2021
“This is the future white kids have to look forward to in our new ‘multicultural’ country. The Great Replacement is happening and this is what the fruits of that Great Replacement look like. This week alone Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk addressed and acknowledged the Great Replacement. That was unthinkable even six months ago. The Overton Window is shifting rapidly and people are starting to finally wake up to what is going on in The West.” — Andrew Torba, in a post on Gab, Sept. 25, 2021
“I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a President into office, cucks.” — Andrew Torba, in a Facebook post that resulted in him being kicked out of the Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator, Nov. 11, 2016
Background
Andrew Torba founded Gab in 2016 in Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania.
Early on, Gab set itself apart from more mainstream social media sites through its embrace of minimal content moderation policies. Its terms of service included a few restrictions, including that users could not post child porn, make threats, dox (i.e., post private information, such as addresses or phone numbers) each other or promote terrorist organizations. Though Torba has sometimes sought to portray the site as a place “where anybody can come and speak freely,” as he told The Washington Post in 2016, its lax terms of service soon made it an ideal hub for neo-Nazis, white nationalists, members of antigovernment militias and other members of the far right.
“We let you say what you want to say if it’s not illegal. And by the way, we’re applying U.S. law — because in many parts of the world, ‘Hate Speech’ (which I believe, personally, does not exist, it’s not a real thing) is illegal,” Torba told Peter Brimelow of the white nationalist website VDARE in an interview from 2020.
Torba has frequently presented his site’s right-wing users as victims and Gab as a haven for them to continue expressing their views.
“With respect to our conservative user base, when a group of people are being systematically dehumanized and labelled as an alphabet soup of phobias, they will look for a place that will allow them to speak freely without censorship that is devoid of social justice bullying,” Torba told BBC News in December 2016, around the same time a number of prominent white nationalists and other far-right figures joined Gab after Twitter banned them.
Growth in Gab’s userbase has often coincided with the widespread deplatforming of users on more mainstream social media sites. (“Deplatforming” refers to the practice of a website or service removing users from a platform, often in response to violations of terms of service, including prohibitions on hate speech.) Following the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Gab welcomed users who were banned from other major platforms. Similarly, following the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, traffic to Gab’s website jumped 800%, according to a report from NPR. Researchers from Stanford found that the influx of users in the aftermath of the insurrection “resulted in a much higher level of baseline activity on Gab, as well as significantly increased revenue.”
Yet Torba’s efforts to expand the company have often been fraught, and he has appeared more invested in expanding the services on his site than ensuring they are user-friendly or secure.
Users, for example, have complained for years about the poor search function on the platform. Torba also had to take Gab offline after a security breach in February 2021 that exposed private information for about 4 million Gab accounts.
Today, the digital infrastructure that Torba has built into the site includes public and private discussion groups, anonymous microblogging capabilities, a marketplace to buy and sell goods, a video-streaming portal and an alternative payment processing service.
Understanding Gab users
Gab users have included the man who carried out the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history and multiple people arrested and charged with threats of violence. It has also served as a home for participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection on the U.S. Capitol and dozens of neo-Nazi, white nationalist, antisemitic, neo-Confederate, antigovernment and neo-Völkisch groups that the Southern Poverty Law Center tracks.
Robert Bowers, who murdered 11 people and injured six others at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 27, 2018, in the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history, posted on Gab under the handle @onedingo. Bowers operated a verified account on the platform, meaning he likely paid the company for the feature. On the site, Bowers regularly interacted with members of the racist right.
On the morning of the attack, Bowers posted to Gab: “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.” “HIAS” stands for Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which is a Jewish American nonprofit that provides aid to refugees. It is a frequent target of right-wing, antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Bowers also regularly shared neo-Nazi iconography, including the alphanumeric code “1488.” The “14” refers to the 14 words, a racist slogan penned by a member of the violent white supremacist terrorist group The Order, and “88” stands for “Heil Hitler,” as “H” is the eighth letter in the alphabet. In response to the shooting, financial and internet service companies PayPal, GoDaddy, Joyent, Stripe and Medium all ended their relationships with Gab. Gab also removed Bowers’ @onedingo account from the site shortly after the attack.
In June 2023, a federal jury in Pennsylvania found Bowers guilty of 63 criminal counts. The jury later sentenced Bowers to death.
Several other men with ties to acts of alleged violence or threats of violence have also used the platform. NBC News revealed in 2023 that Travis Ikeguchi, who is accused of gunning down a 66-year-old woman over an LGBTQ+ pride flag that she hung outside of her store in California, operated an account on the website. Another man, Adam Bies of Mercer, Pennsylvania, was arrested and charged after he posted to Gab that he intended to “water the trees of liberty” with FBI agents’ blood. He later pleaded guilty to charges of interstate threats and influencing or retaliating against a federal officer by threat.
In 2019, authorities in Florida arrested and charged Joshua John Leff, who posted on Gab under the moniker “Paul Atreides,” with multiple charges related to homophobic and racist screeds he allegedly posted on Gab and another fringe site, BitChute. Gab waited three days to remove Leff’s account from the website, the SPLC’s Hatewatch found.
Despite Gab’s stated prohibition on terrorism, multiple groups and figures who explicitly advocate for racist terroristic violence use, or have used, the site to spread their propaganda. Some of these same users have shared content explicitly advocating for acts of racial terrorism or glorifying those who engage in it as “saints.”
The American Futurist, a neo-Nazi publication operated by former members of the pro-terrorism group Atomwaffen Division, has had an account on Gab since April 2020. Its cover photo depicts a wall with the slogan, “The Day of the Rope Is Coming.” The term refers to an act of mass murder in the fictional white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries, in which so-called “race traitors” are murdered in mass lynchings.
One contributor to The American Futurist, Atomwaffen Division cofounder Brandon Russell, currently faces charges related to allegedly encouraging terrorist attacks targeting electricity infrastructure in Maryland.
Rinaldo Nazzaro, the Russia-based founder of The Base, also operates an account on Gab under the moniker “Roman Wolf.” In 2024, Nazzaro shared a post where he advocated for “an organized war effort” to defend white people. Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand have designated Nazzaro’s group as a terrorist organization.
Users associated with Atomwaffen Division, Feuerkrieg Division and Sonnenkrieg Division have also used the platform to circulate propaganda advocating for racial terrorism to U.S. and international audiences. The United Kingdom has designated all three groups as terrorist entities. Canada and Australia have also listed Atomwaffen Division, as well as a recent offshoot of the group called the National Socialist Order, as terrorist. Supporters of James Mason, a neo-Nazi figurehead and Atomwaffen Division collaborator who is banned in Canada for promoting terrorism, have also used the site to promote his work, including his terroristic tome Siege.
Iron March, a forum that helped birth various white power accelerationist groups including Atomwaffen Division, also once operated an account on Gab.
Rescuing a white nationalist site
At least one prominent white nationalist group has credited Gab’s parallel web infrastructure, specifically its own in-house payment processing system, with permitting it to continue fundraising online.
VDARE, a white nationalist website run by Peter and Lydia Brimelow, announced in February 2024 that it intended to use Gab’s in-house payment processing system, Gab Pay, for online donations going forward. The decision came after Lydia Brimelow, VDARE’s publisher, announced that the site’s “long-standing payment processor” had “stabbed [VDARE] in the back” and denied the white nationalist site access to its services.
“Without @gabpay this would be the end of the road for us, after 25 years as The Voice Of The Historic American Nation. Thank you @a. You’ve made the bitter bittersweet,” Brimelow wrote, tagging Torba, who uses the handle “@a” on Gab, in the Feb. 19 post.
Torba appears to have visited the castle that VDARE owns in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, at least once, according to a January 2021 post on the VDARE.com website. In the post, which consisted of a transcript and video that Torba conducted with Peter Brimelow, VDARE’s founder, the header image includes a picture Torba standing outside of what appears to be the castle. The same image includes another small photo of a statue inside the castle wearing a green hat that Gab sells as merchandise that reads, “Make Speech Free Again.”
Understanding Gab’s extremist community
Other SPLC-designated white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups and their leaders use, or have used, Gab to recruit and spread their ideologies, including the National Socialist Movement, Aryan Freedom Network, American Renaissance, League of the South (LoS), Patriot Front, local active clubs, the New Columbia Movement, Full Haus, VDARE, the New Jersey European Heritage Association and the National Justice Party.
Many well-known leaders of neo-Nazi and white nationalist groups have personal Gab pages, including Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin, LoS leader Michael Hill, America First Foundation leader Nick Fuentes, the Colchester Collection publisher Russell James, and VDARE figureheads Peter and Lydia Brimelow.
SPLC-designated antisemitic groups, including the Goyim Defense League and its leader Jon Minadeo, use Gab. Antisemite E. Michael Jones also uses Gab and regularly interacts with Torba on the platform.
Gab has proven to be a crucial platform for white nationalist, neo-Nazi, and antisemitic groups to recruit, fundraise and even organize offline demonstrations.
In late 2023, an associate of Goyim Defense League created a Gab group called “City Council Death Squad” to organize an antisemitic troll campaign. Participants in the campaign target the public comment period during open-access governmental meetings across the country, where they demonize Jewish people, attack Jewish leaders and promote an antisemitic conspiracy theory that suggests Jews run the world.
Before the white nationalist National Justice Party disbanded due to infighting in December 2023, the group used Gab to organize fundraisers and events, including its “Operation White Christmas” toy drive.
The white nationalist Patriot Front uses Gab to connect with potential supporters and circulate propaganda. A Gab group titled “Patriot Front Frens” that says it is composed of nonmembers has shared media articles, rumors and propaganda videos of the group’s racist activities.
These online communities allow white nationalist and neo-Nazi hate groups to circulate their racist propaganda to an already existing audience receptive to far-right extremist ideas on race, sexual orientation, gender, religion and ability.
One team of scholars studied how Gab’s platform — one based on low content moderation, anonymous microblogging and a subscription model — creates a shared identity among far-right activists who bond over their perceived persecution. Indeed, these scholars suggest that Gab provides the platform for a far-right community to bond over their shared experiences of being deplatformed by “Big Tech.”
According to the authors, “The narrative of persecution at the hands of platforms like Facebook and Twitter among Gab users helps to unify the most hardcore neo-Nazi and white supremacists with the less socially maligned Trumpian Republican users.” In this sense, white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups joined Gab not only to recruit, but also to join an already existing community of like-minded extremists.
Gab and the 2021 insurrection
Gab was one of close to a dozen social media sites that Trump supporters used to drum up support for the lie that the supporters of President Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, as well as to later plan and promote their assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Prior to the attack, Gab users discussed what weapons to bring, as well as how to overwhelm law enforcement. “Pack a crowbar,” wrote one user on Gab, according to a later report in The New York Times. Others shared posts with such hashtags as “Storm the Capitol,” “civil war,” and “Fight for Trump.”
During the attack, Gab users shared videos they took of themselves entering congressional offices, including the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Other users shared photographs showing people using tools to pry open doors and carrying guns inside the Capitol building.
Yet unlike more mainstream sites like Facebook, YouTube or Twitter, Gab set itself apart through Torba’s own apparent promotion of election denial.
In the run-up to the insurrection, Torba promoted posts espousing election denial and encouraging users to travel to Washington, D.C. On Jan. 3, 2021, he promoted a raffle from another Gab user intended to defray the costs of traveling to Washington, D.C. A day prior to the attack, Torba encouraged users on their way to D.C. to “document as much as you can. … Big Tech will undoubtably [sic] be censoring any and all footage to downplay the massive turnout and hide any communist violence that arises.”
On Jan. 6, 2021, Torba wrote in a post on his own Gab account, “In a system with rigged elections there are no longer any viable political solutions.”
Torba has denied culpability in the attack. In a Jan. 13, 2021, press release he appeared to deflect from the platform’s role in the attack and wrote that “the protests were actually organized” on Facebook.
Gab reported that the site received 2.3 million new users within the week after the insurrection but did not share any evidence of such growth. This alleged uptick in signups to Gab’s site also corresponded with Amazon Web Services suspending hosting services for Parler, another social media platform popular with Trump supporters and used by Jan. 6, 2021, participants to plan and/or amplify events that day.
Following the leader of Gab
Before starting Gab, Torba, along with his college roommate, developed Kuhcoon, a management platform for Facebook ads, in 2011. The pair later renamed the company Automate Ads.
Founders at the popular Silicon Valley business incubator Y Combinator reportedly invited Torba to join their group in 2014 to grow his Facebook advertising platform, which AdHawk purchased in 2017 for an undisclosed amount. Prior to the sale, Y Combinator kicked Torba out for violating its harassment policies after he responded to a Facebook thread about the 2016 election results with racist and bigoted taunts.
“All of you: fuck off. Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling bullshit and shove it. I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a President into office, cucks,” Torba said in the thread, which included some of the founders of Y Combinator. Torba posted the comments in a thread discussing an increase in hostilities and aggression toward minorities after the election results were announced.
After Y Combinator threw him out for violating its harassment policies, Torba put all his energy into building Gab.
From 2017 to 2019, Gab’s parent company, Gab AI Inc., raised $2 million through two crowdfunding rounds facilitated by the company StartEngine Crowdfunding Inc. The California-based company allows companies to sell securities to investors and aids them in preparing regulatory filings.
Torba’s dedication to the lax moderation standards that drew such figures as Bowers and terroristic neo-Nazi groups to the platform has left his company unstable and susceptible to deplatforming from the web service and payment processing services that allow a social media company to run effectively. While StartEngine’s crowdfunding services provided Gab with a crucial lifeline after losing access to its payment processor and other services following the 2018 Tree of Life shooting, it has come to rely on an increasingly niche array of companies to support Gab’s activities, even as Torba has sought to expand the company.
After Gab lost access to its payment processor, the company said it lost 90% of its subscription revenue in public filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In January 2019, Gab announced it had retained 2nd Amendment Processing LLC to be its new payment processor. Torba praised the company for its willingness to work with companies who struggle to maintain “payment processing services for political reasons.”
Yet as Hatewatch reported in March 2019, 2nd Amendment Processing LLC’s CEO pleaded guilty in 2007 to charges of obtaining property by deception, passing bad checks and possessing false identification.
In early 2019, Gab withdrew a request it submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to sell stocks to finance the company. A few weeks prior, SPLC’s Hatewatch reported that someone working for Gab’s web hosting company expressed doubt about the number of users that Gab listed in its SEC filings.
Epik, a web host popular with the far right, served as Gab’s registrar from November 2018 to April 2023, according to WHOIS records. Epik’s former CEO Rob Monster praised Torba and Gab’s other operators as “vigilant” after he took on the company as a client. A November 2018 article in The Seattle Times cited Monster as speculating whether some of the “garbage” on the site came from people trying to make Gab look bad.
Promoting the ‘great replacement’
Upon joining the platform, all new Gab users automatically follow Torba’s account, which uses the handle @a.
On his personal Gab account, Torba shares explicitly racist and antisemitic propaganda, including tenets of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. The “great replacement” theory claims a group of elites is intentionally trying to “replace” whites with non-white people, particularly through immigration.
“This is the future white kids have to look forward to in our new ‘multicultural’ country. The Great Replacement is happening and this is what the fruits of that Great Replacement look like,” Torba wrote in a Sept. 24, 2021, post on Gab.
“The Overton Window is shifting rapidly and people are starting to wake up to what is going on in The West,” he wrote in the same post, referencing a segment on former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s show a few days prior in which he accused President Joe Biden of encouraging immigrants to come to the United States to “change the racial mix of the country.”
“They target men with p*rn and sports, they target women with feminism and consumerism. They distract you both with an endless supply of dopamine hits in the form of vapid meaningless entertainment and bot-fueled social media likes all while importing your replacements from the third-world by the millions every year while you’re not forming families,” Torba wrote in a Jan. 8, 2024, post on Gab.
Fears of white replacement have underpinned acts of racist violence for decades. Over the past several years, multiple racist mass murderers have cited the “great replacement” explicitly in their screeds or attacks. This includes the perpetrators of a March 2019 mass shooting at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, which left 51 people dead; an August 2019 mass shooting of Latinx shoppers at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, which left 23 dead; and a May 2022 shooting targeting Black shoppers at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, which left 10 dead.
Dylann Roof, who faces the death penalty for murdering nine Black churchgoers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, also cited racist conspiracy theories about demographic changes within the West as one of the motivating factors behind his attack, though his attack took place prior to the popularization of the term “great replacement” in the United States.
Torba’s ties to the radical right
Since launching Gab in 2016, Torba has courted, collaborated with and promoted a range of figures on the radical right, including antigovernment conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, male supremacists and other extremists. He has appeared on Alex Jones’ show multiple times to promote the site, and he retains an account on Cozy. TV, a streaming platform founded by Nick Fuentes, where he has nearly 3,500 followers.
In addition to Torba’s public cooperation with extremists, a data breach targeting Gab’s internal user data in 2021 also highlighted his connection to multiple extremist factions on the far right. About six weeks after the Jan. 6 attack, a hacktivist collective reportedly retrieved 70GB of data about the platform’s 4.1 million users, then provided the data to the Distributed Denial of Secrets website. The breach included Gab user information, direct messages, public posts and profiles, as well as information from private groups and posts that users had marked as private.
The Guardian uncovered Torba messaging with QAnon propagandist Richard Cornero Jr., who is among the most vocal voices spreading baseless claims about pedophile rings controlled by leaders of the Democratic Party.
Mother Jones found Torba messaging with well-known misogynist Roosh V, whose real name is Daryush Valizadeh. In these messages, Torba welcomed Valizadeh to the platform and praised antisemite E. Michael Jones. In one message to Valizadeh, Torba writes, “I am a huge fan of EMJ too, he has an account but hasn’t logged in for some time,” and then asks Valizadeh to help push Jones to use his Gab account more regularly. After this exchange, Mother Jones found that Jones began to upload more content to the platform.
After Mother Jones reached out for comment on March 8, 2022, about the data leak, Torba doubled down on his support for far-right extremists, stating in a post to Gab, “I apologize for absolutely nothing because I did nothing wrong here. I am indeed a big fan of [Valizadeh] and [Jones].” Later that day, Gab used its account on Twitter to promote white nationalist Nick Fuentes, writing that Fuentes and Gab “embody the true and relentless spirit of American excellence, ingenuity, grit, and defiance in the face of tyranny.” About two weeks before this Twitter post, Torba spoke at Fuentes’ 2022 America First Political Action Conference.
As the 2022 elections unfolded, Torba involved himself in political campaigns in his home state of Pennsylvania, endorsing Doug Mastriano for governor and Kathy Barnette for senator. Both candidates embraced far-right conspiracies about migrant crime, the 2020 election, COVID and vaccines, and sought to ban books in schools and libraries that promoted truthful history about racism in the U.S. In a Nov. 5, 2022, blog, Torba argued: “This election is the first step to taking back this country for the glory of God. We need to win. I’m asking you to vote Republican in your state and pray specifically for Doug’s victory here in PA.”
In addition, a Media Matters investigation revealed Torba’s direct involvement with Mastriano’s campaign, which paid Gab $5,000 for “consulting” in April 2022. Following weeks of criticism, Mastriano issued a statement on July 28 appearing to distance himself from Torba, stating, “I reject antisemitism in any form.” However, Media Matters found that just six days before making this statement, on July 22, the Mastriano campaign accepted a $500 donation from Torba.
Gab’s far-right economy
Driven by a false sense of white Christian victimization, Torba is building the so-called “parallel economy” that has been a popular goal among white nationalists, neo-Nazis and antisemites for decades. Torba announced his plans with a not-so-veiled antisemitic dog whistle, writing in a Gab News article, “The people are learning what the real problem in our society is: the globalist oligarchs.” Torba then railed against “centralized movements” controlled by a shadowy cabal of “transhumanist nihilists” that offer “technocracy” but “nothing of spiritual value.”
In the article, Torba wrote that building a parallel economy also includes forgoing participation in national elections and instead focusing on “getting American Populists and Christian men and women elected mayor, to state legislatures, as judges, on school boards etc.” Torba’s article, written in 2021, is representative of a shift in the far-right movement that has seen some groups getting involved in local politics, including using racist and antisemitic slurs during city council meetings, menacing participants of school board meetings, and protesting outside churches, hospitals and government buildings.
As Torba attempts to build a parallel economy, Gab earns revenue through donations, advertising and its subscription service GabPRO. According to a 2022 report from Stanford Internet Observatory, roughly 24,100 users had subscribed to GabPRO, which offers users the opportunity to hide ads, get a “verified” status, access Gab Voice and receive extra exposure on the platform for $9.99 per month. Gab Voice allows users to send text communications and hold video conferences. The authors of the report estimated Gab earned approximately $1.6 million to $4.5 million per year from the GabPRO subscription service.
Gab also collects money from user donations. The 2022 report from Stanford Internet Observatory found around 5,700 users display a badge on their profile that signifies they have donated to the platform. Users are provided a range of donation options between $25 and $500. The 2022 report revealed many prominent voices in the hard right have given money to Gab, including Alex Jones, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Mike Lindell. The SPLC’s Data Lab has tracked an additional 14.2302 in Bitcoin donated to Gab as of March 2024, worth about $327,752 at the time the funds were sent.
Image at top: Photo illustration by the SPLC; screenshot of Andrew Torba from YouTube.