Gab.com CEO Andrew Torba has made clear that his U.S.-based company will not comply with demands from the European Union to suppress and remove content posted by Russian media outlets on Thursday.
The EU’s demands, disclosed by Google in a removal request public database, calls for search engines and social media platforms to remove posts and search results for outlets such as Russia Today and Sputnik news. No such demands were issued for Ukrainian media.
“It follows from the foregoing that social media must prevent users from broadcasting … any content of RT and Sputnik,” the EU insisted, going on to to decree that posts from those outlets “shall not be published, and if published, must be deleted.”
Andrew Torba, CEO of free speech social media website Gab, responded to the news on the company’s official Twitter account by stating, “Gab is an American company, accordingly we do not care about EU sanctions lol.”
https://twitter.com/getongab/status/1502014251342381067
In a blog post published on March 4, Torba noted, “We also aren’t going to ban a foreign news outlet or Russian citizens for no reason. RT News has been on Gab for over a year now and has never once even come close to violating our terms of service.”
“Gab is now the one place on the internet where you can find RT News and you can do so by clicking here,” the Gab CEO added, providing a link to the official RT Gab account.
Torba also stated that during the same week Gab employees had uncovered “a massive anti-Russian botnet on our platform,” which he says was “immediately banned.”
“There were hundreds of newly created accounts all sharing the same dozen or so IP addresses,” the post claimed. “They were reposting, commenting, and liking anti-Russian fake news to the Gab Explore page. Our bot detection systems caught them quickly and we removed them from the platform.”
Gab remains one of the only “free speech” companies that has not moved to limit Russian free speech rights. Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo announced on Thursday that they will be manipulating their search results to hide “Russian disinformation.”
