What is Gab? A Bastion of Free Speech or an Alt-Right Echo Chamber?

TL;DR

This paper provides the first comprehensive analysis of Gab, a social network emphasizing free speech, revealing its user base, content focus, and high prevalence of hate speech compared to other platforms.

Contribution

It offers the first characterization of Gab, analyzing 22 million posts to understand its user demographics, content themes, and hate speech prevalence.

Findings

Gab is mainly used for news and world events discussion.

It attracts alt-right, conspiracy theorists, and trolls.

Hate speech on Gab is higher than Twitter but lower than 4chan.

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.