From “Welcome New Gabbers” to the Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting: The Evolution of Gab
Reid McIlroy-Young, Ashton Anderson · Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media · 2019
Gab, an online social media platform with very little content moderation, has recently come to prominence as an alt-right community and a haven for hate speech. We document the evolution of Gab since its inception until a Gab user carried out the most deadly attack on the Jewish community in US history. We investigate Gab language use, study how topics evolved over time, and find that the shooters’ posts were among the most consistently anti-Semitic on Gab, but that hundreds of other users were even more extreme.