Just read that BitMitigate was recently bought by Rob Monster of Epik, a really nasty piece of work.
"...in a January post on its Hatewatch blog, the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote that Monster’s willingness to host Gab and similar websites means that he is “cornering the market on websites where hate speech is thriving.”
Dec 2018 HuffPo article:
The Bible-Thumping Tech CEO Who’s Proud Of Keeping Neo-Nazis Online: Rob Monster claims he helped resurrect Gab because of his commitment to free speech. He also has a lot to say about Jews.
... Monster registered Gab’s domain in November, after several internet service providers abandoned the platform in response to one of its users allegedly killing 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue. Since then, Monster, a Bible-quoting Christian, has defended Gab’s violent neo-Nazis, smeared critics who call for more regulation on the site, and made baseless claims that the racists on Gab are actually fake accounts created by liberals who want to make Gab look bad.
... But Monster’s ideology and rhetoric can at times be almost indistinguishable from those of the neo-Nazis he’s defended on Gab. And his actions have a broader significance: Gab’s re-emergence marked a major setback for the growing activist-led movement to deplatform racists into irrelevance. The ease with which Monster, a tiny player in the tech community, was able to revive a gathering space for extremists illustrates the main limitation of deplatforming efforts: They require universal agreement. As long as one person, somewhere, is willing to host the hate, deplatforming doesn’t work. ...
But he was soon sounding a lot more like the site’s most extreme users than a neutral tech CEO. Despite his diverse circle of friends, Monster appears at ease with the anti-Semitic slurs and racist fearmongering that are rampant on the site. Earlier this month, he approvingly shared a video by Faith Goldy, a Canadian white nationalist, that characterized migrants as the bearers of “rape epidemics, sharia law, and the spectacle of terror.” ...
But even the white supremacists whose favored social network Monster is backstopping don’t buy everything he’s saying to defend Gab. Last month, he shared an image on Twitter claiming that 99 percent of neo-Nazis on Gab are actually liberals looking to “give enemies of freedom an excuse.” Cantwell, one of those neo-Nazis, quickly corrected him. “We’re not liberals, nor are the people trying to get us censored. The people trying to censor Gab are (((communists))), and the Nazis are the only ones willing to take them on,” Cantwell posted, using triple parentheses to indicate he was referring to Jewish people. “Eventually,” he said, “everyone will have to pick a side.” ...
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/rob-monster-epik-gab-neo-nazi_n_5c17bb29e4b05d7e5d846f72
Hard to imagine enemy states like Russia don't have a finger in this somehow. Btw, the "liberals - antisemitism" meme currently so popular with extremists on both right and left has shown up on DU's Primaries forum, disguised of course.
= new reply since forum marked as read
