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

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.

I. Introduction

Free speech and hate speech have opened a long debate between regulation and freedom of expression, especially in the online space. Currently, most online social networks have strict policies against hate speech and moderate the content posted by its users. In particular, Twitter, Facebook, Google (YouTube), and Reddit have largely increased removals of hate speech [1], [2]. This scenario has motivated the emergence of a new social network system, named Gab¹

https://gab.ai/

, which was originally designed to be a social network that promotes free speech.