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

TL;DR

This paper characterizes Gab, a social network promoting free speech, revealing its politically oriented user base, prevalence of banned users, and its role as a right-leaning echo chamber with limited cross-ideological content exposure.

Contribution

It provides the first measurement of news dissemination within a right-leaning echo chamber on Gab, highlighting user characteristics and content sharing patterns.

Findings

Gab hosts banned users from other social networks due to hate speech or extremism.

The platform is highly politically oriented with limited exposure to cross-ideological content.

It is a significant example of a right-leaning echo chamber in social media.

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.