Inside the Right-Leaning Echo Chambers: Characterizing Gab, an Unmoderated Social System

Abstract

The moderation of content in many social media systems, such as Twitter and Facebook, motivated the emergence of a new social network system that promotes free speech, named Gab. Soon after that, Gab has been removed from Google Play Store for violating the company's hate speech policy and it has been rejected by Apple for similar reasons. In this paper we characterize Gab, aiming at understanding who are the users who joined it and what kind of content they share in this system. Our findings show that Gab is a very politically oriented system that hosts banned users from other social networks, some of them due to possible cases of hate speech and association with extremism. We provide the first measurement of news dissemination inside a right-leaning echo chamber, investigating a social media where readers are rarely exposed to content that cuts across ideological lines, but rather are fed with content that reinforces their current political or social views.

Spread of Hate Speech in Online Social Media

“…They also found that Gab contains 2.4 times most hatspeech as compared to Twitter. (de Lima et al 2018) also found that Gab is very politically oriented and users who abuse the lack of moderation disseminate hate. (Zannettou et al 2018b) perform a large scale measurement study of the meme ecosystem by introducing a novel image processing pipeline.…”

Contextualizing Hate Speech Classifiers with Post-hoc Explanation

“…The "Gab Hate Corpus" (GHC; Kennedy et al, 2020) is a large, random sample (N = 27,655) from the Pushshift.io data dump of the Gab network * , which we have annotated according to a typology of "hate-based rhetoric", a construct motivated by hate speech criminal codes outside the U.S. and social science research on prejudice and dehumanization. Gab is a social network with a high rate of hate speech (Zannettou et al, 2018;Lima et al, 2018) and populated by the "Alt-right" (Anthony, 2016;Benson, 2016). Similarly with respect to domain and definitions, de Gibert et al (2018) sampled and annotated posts from the "Stormfront" web domain (Meddaugh and Kay, 2009) and annotated at the sentence level according to a similar annotation guide as used in the GHC.…”

Hate Contagion: Measuring the spread and trajectory of hate on social media

“…Users post short messages which can be reposted, replied to, or 'liked' by other users of the platform. Gab is known for its lax hate speech moderation policies and the high proportion of messages containing explicit hate terms (Lima et al, 2018;Zannettou et al, 2018), and is seen as 'rolling out the welcome mat' to users banned from social media sites (Anti-Defamation League, 2019). The platform is heavily focused on political content and topics closely follow current affairs, particularly around political ideology, race, and terrorism (Zhou, Dredze, Broniatowski, & Adler, 2019), including Nazi imagery, antisemitic material, holocaust denial, islamophobia, along with much wider forms of hate against other target groups (Weich, 2019).…”