What is Gab? A Bastion of Free Speech or an Alt-Right Echo Chamber?
Date Issued
February 14, 2018
DOI
10.1145/3184558.3191531
Abstract
Over the past few years, a number of new "fringe" communities, like 4chan or
certain subreddits, have gained traction on the Web at a rapid pace. However,
more often than not, little is known about how they evolve or what kind of
activities they attract, despite recent research has shown that they influence
how false information reaches mainstream communities. This motivates the need
to monitor these communities and analyze their impact on the Web's information
ecosystem. In August 2016, a new social network called Gab was created as an
alternative to Twitter. It positions itself as putting "people and free speech
first'", welcoming users banned or suspended from other social networks. In
this paper, we provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first
characterization of Gab. We collect and analyze 22M posts produced by 336K
users between August 2016 and January 2018, finding that Gab is predominantly
used for the dissemination and discussion of news and world events, and that it
attracts alt-right users, conspiracy theorists, and other trolls. We also
measure the prevalence of hate speech on the platform, finding it to be much
higher than Twitter, but lower than 4chan's Politically Incorrect board.
certain subreddits, have gained traction on the Web at a rapid pace. However,
more often than not, little is known about how they evolve or what kind of
activities they attract, despite recent research has shown that they influence
how false information reaches mainstream communities. This motivates the need
to monitor these communities and analyze their impact on the Web's information
ecosystem. In August 2016, a new social network called Gab was created as an
alternative to Twitter. It positions itself as putting "people and free speech
first'", welcoming users banned or suspended from other social networks. In
this paper, we provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first
characterization of Gab. We collect and analyze 22M posts produced by 336K
users between August 2016 and January 2018, finding that Gab is predominantly
used for the dissemination and discussion of news and world events, and that it
attracts alt-right users, conspiracy theorists, and other trolls. We also
measure the prevalence of hate speech on the platform, finding it to be much
higher than Twitter, but lower than 4chan's Politically Incorrect board.
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