Gab is not a Free Speech Platform | by Claire Lovely | Sep, 2021 | Medium

1    13 Sep 2021 04:44 by u/claire_lovely

Gab claims to be a free speech platform while it is far more heavily censored than the so-called establishment sites that it commonly criticizes: https://claire-lovely.medium.com/gab-is-not-a-free-speech-platform-11e889da1e0f

13 comments

7 u/QuantumLegion 13 Sep 2021 05:04
You can get porn anywhere now. It's not like when I was a kid, when you had to go to your uncles house and sneak in the attic or under his bed to find the good Playboys and Hustler mags while he was out talking to your dad in the garage, sweating in terror the entire time, listening for the door downstairs to pop open. If you want porn, all you have to do is click a button on your computer in the privacy of your own bedroom, and Viola! all the free naked you want. So this complaint is, to me anyway, silly. There's a niche for everything. You don't need to have Everything on every single platform. And if Gab and Parler don't want to host porn, well fine....go to freaking pornhub or redtube or whatever. Sheez. No one is stopping you. If you really want to make an argument they're not free speech, lets talk about parler being a honey pot and Gab following in it's footsteps by making you become "authenticated" now to post so the Feds can track you. I have never been on Parler, and I went off Gab when they started that nonsense. That's a violation of free speech, and furthermore, blatant spying. But porn? Come on.
1 u/MrMan 13 Sep 2021 06:47
I'm not "authenticated" and i post all the time on gab
3 u/JoeMcCarthy 15 Sep 2021 03:04
That strikes me as unconvincing as the clear motivation of many is to ban pornography most anywhere. Doing it on one or two that are successful is precedent to make it more widespread. Then when it is more widespread is anyone going to make your argument even half seriously that free speech isn't being limited? At that point the prudes just tell us porn is not free speech, which is their agenda all along, and your talking points become completely meaningless. Indeed, your argument is really just a milder version of theirs anyway... it'd be more honest just to have a discussion about the desirability of porn on social media rather than this creeping censorship approach. Basically it mostly comes down to whether hot naked women should be performing sex acts on camera. And whether people really think that is a bannable activity. All things considered I mostly think women doing this is awesome so I say it isn't. In some sense it should even be encouraged that they do it. And making it accessible on Gab or some other active site would make it safer elsewhere. There isn't usually enough attention given to the contentious content at issue in these speech issues. It's often reduced to people rationalizing censorship by claiming it isn't what it is. That's bad enough - but the content itself isn't even a big deal. At least no more certainly than talk or advocacy of drugs, or even drinking or smoking in a way that normalizes its use - which is allowable on these platforms in a way that isn't controversial. Or any of a number of other questionable things that aren't banned. We're just mostly dealing with moralists that are offended by nekkid ladies and sexual content and want to ban it for those that aren't. Pretty much as simple as that.
4 u/RetardedPotato 13 Sep 2021 06:32
Retarded argument. Gab was made so conservatives can have a voice SOMEWHERE. It not allowing porn is like saying your gift isn't perfectly wrapped so you don't like it.
3 u/MrMan 13 Sep 2021 06:50
The article in a nutshell "Waa waaa I can't jack off on gab, waa waaa". You can say what you want. Just because you can't promote you whores only fans site on there, doesn't make it anti free speech.
1 u/redditban 13 Sep 2021 07:45
Onion web used to be so free you could get anything. There was vids of anything man, like, it really shows what the human race will do for money. I seen it all, kids being beheaded by isis while being raped and the caption was I jizz when the head is cut. People being set on fire and a full 20 minutes of being killed while rocks where thrown at them. 12 year old being raped and then suffocated to death or beaten and dismembered. Human farms and kids being roasted on a fire and then a bunch of people literally picking at the charred body for a potluck. Remember these atrocities bc a lot of people think that shit is normal.
1 u/VILLAIN 13 Sep 2021 12:27
>claims to have watched videos over TOR larp okay lets assume you actually did wait for these videos to load... that means you were actually looking for them, why the fuck would you out yourself as a pedophile? retarded nonce.
1 u/FatalError 13 Sep 2021 13:14
Dumb fucking argument. Go jack off to the 10 billion porn websites coomer
1 u/SnapperTrx 13 Sep 2021 14:37
Free speech does not mean "open to everything", free speech means you can speak your opinion and not have to worry about having it removed because it doesn't fall in line with someone else's viewpoint. This article is silly.
1 u/MutantBeth 13 Sep 2021 18:52
Porn isn't speech
1 u/None 20 Sep 2021 19:42
i see medium and i see "what are they going to accuse the right of now" and now it is because they don't want porn on their site. I think this is just an excuse to attack the religious people. I'm pretty pro free speech but I wouldn't let porn on my platform (if i had one). Simple reason is I don't want to be responsible for it. Could you imagine having to hire people to scan through porn to see if there is any CP on there? Yeah i'd just ban that... to many legal issues there. disclaimer: my experience on gab was, create account, login, go.. ik, delete account.
-2 u/doliu 13 Sep 2021 06:13
I'm really starting to tire of this whole 'free speech' debate and the conflation of such in random online websites. Free speech as a law concept, already applies to every site that falls under a state's jurisdiction that has provisions for such concepts. Note how even a supposed total free speech website will still suppress content posted to it that breaks the law. When we talk about 'free speech' vs in the context of website policy like this, as opposed to law and civil rights, what we are really referring to is a spectrum of how heavily moderated the site is, and that's not a novel issue at all, it's existed since Usenet and BBSes running before the birth of the internet as we know it. Websites run the gamut from relatively 'unmoderated' (4chan, Gab, FSE), to 'heavily moderated' like your typical government or local council discussion board, to 'moderated in a completely incoherent and non-transparent manner' (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube). Gab has made its money by conflating free speech as a civil rights issue with their internal moderation policies, but when it boils down to it, it's just rhetoric and Gab is just another cheap Twitter knock-off wearing a MAGA hat. If they want to ban porn, whatever. Yes it's hypocritical to their 'we allow anything that's not illegal' ethos but that's the absolute least of their problems. People keep talking about Twitter and Facebook like they are a 'town square'. They are not a town squares, they are bars, and like any bar, you can be thrown out for any reason. These bars might be multiplex skyscrapers that stretch into the stratosphere and seat two billion guests, but they are bars nonetheless. If you don't like the way they run it, just go find another bar and take your friends there. The entire debate about this kind of stuff is fundamentally confused. We don't need alternatives because our free speech rights are threatened, we need alternatives because the big platforms are shitty places, designed to manipulate, addict and exploit people, that bring out the worst in people, that destroy reasoned discourse and make societies sick.
1 u/redditban 13 Sep 2021 08:09
Seriously people are so entitled now. Reminds me of the beachy amish, not gonna follow a single rule but still amish bc of beard or something.