The Synagogue Shooter’s Social Media Platform Is in Peril—Because Its Hate-Speech-Friendly Policy...

"The future of the website is in peril. On Saturday, PayPal banned Gab from using its payment processing. Hours later, Stripe followed suit, as did Joyent, the company that provided cloud-hosting services for Gab, after which Gab wrote on Twitter that it has “until 9am on Monday to find a solution. Gab will likely be down for weeks because of this. Working on solutions. We will never give up on defending free speech for all people.” This isn’t the first time Gab has struggled to interoperate with web service providers. Apple and Google both have refused to host Gab on their app stores, and still, without a smartphone app, the site has been able to gain followers and raise money, albeit likely much more slowly than it would if the social media service were easier to access on a smartphone.

Gab may well be able to survive this spate of deplatforming. The site’s creator, Andrew Torba, may be able to find a hosting provider in another country that doesn’t care about hate speech, and he may find another way to accept payment from users who want to invest to keep the site afloat. But if Gab continues to allow hate speech only until it ends in violence, chances are slim at best that the company will be able to ever stop chasing its tail. A dynamic social media platform that hosts shareable videos and photos requires a hefty infrastructure and costs more to build and run than a simple message board, like Stormfront, the oldest and biggest white-supremacist and neo-Nazi message board on the internet. Unless Gab is able to build its own payment systems and find an alt-right–friendly cloud provider that doesn’t mind being implicated in hosting hate speech that leads to violence, the site may never be on sure footing".