Gab hosts many, many, white supremacists. It has become a dumping ground for every social network's rejects...the people who've been booted from Twitter, reddit, etc (platforms that have been criticized for being slow to remove hate speech and incitement to violence, etc.) have congregated on Gab.

This isn't a free speech issue, it is an issue of whether Joyent wants to have responsibility for spreading that kind of thing. They don't, so they aren't. They gave Gab time to sort out alternatives, even though the kinds of things Gab hosts conflict with Joyent's terms of service. I think Joyent is well within their rights to tell'em to kick rocks and go spread their shit somewhere else.

You're arguing a tangential point. Why is it okay to say - "kill all whites" and the platform let's you be but not okay for a user to say "kill jews" and the platform boots the user and yet gets booted itself.

There is no credible threat against white people as a group. Those who say this generally do so as a way to raise awareness of the very real threats posed by white supremacists, not as a real threat. Taken in context, the distinction is easy to make.

As a non-white person who is wholly unsympathetic to the ideas espoused by white supremacists, partly out of reasons of self preservation, making statements such as "kill all whites" doesn't seem like a particularly good method of raising awareness of the dangers posed by hateful and bigoted ideologies. Then again I don't spend much time on Twitter so maybe such statements are able to lead to constructive dialogue there.

I think we can argue tactics in good faith, while understanding that there is not actually a credible movement to eliminate white people. On the flip side, there are active and organized white supremacist groups advocating for the elimination of any number of minorities.

I'm in agreement that there isn't a credible movement to eliminate white people, but I still feel that if companies, and social media sites in particular, are going to have guidelines around acceptable speech on their platforms, they should probably be applied equally regardless of what groups they may target.

Oh, come on. As today's horrible event demonstrated, all it takes is one single unbalanced individual with a semi-automatic weapon, and the members of any group -- white, black, Asian, Latino, Jewish, Muslim -- are at risk.

And writing about killing members of any group only services to rile up and incite those people among us who are predisposed to violence. And those people are of every color and nationality that exists.

Why is there always an "all lives matter" person?

For the record I support BLM.

That's cool, and while I was dismissive, I was making a valid point, I thought (the audience disagrees with me, judging by my downvotes).

The point I was trying to make was that the tragedy you're referencing targeted people because they were Jewish. Saying, "oh, but white people have to be fearful, too" dismisses the hate that drove this despicable act of terror, and it hides the purpose of it. Terrorist actions are meant to scare specific people, and white folks (by the terrorist's definition, which doesn't include Jews) aren't who this terrorist wanted to scare. He wanted to remind Jewish people of what he views as their proper place...running scared. He also had a history of white supremacist posts throughout his twitter and gab history. This was a racially motivated crime, don't downplay that by saying white people could be a target, too.

While we (white folks) could be the target of hate crimes, in the US today, we are not. Jewish folks, black and brown folks of all sorts, LGBTQ folks, are the target of hate crimes, and in growing numbers.

Your comment gives some incredible insight into the mental gymnastic people are capable of in order to justify their own violence & intimidation.

You missed an important step: nobody was on the platform saying "kill all whites" and then going and actually killing whites.

If there was a site that was filled with people saying "kill all whites", and the site was fine with this, and then one of its members went and murdered a load of white people, then yes I'd say they would probably be booted by their host too. They don't get points for booting the actual murderer after he'd done the murders.

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No, because it's a lie spread by white supremacists to engender false equivalency. The Dallas police shooter was not involved in Black Lives Matter, and BLM is an explicitly non-violent organization and always has been.

Media and activists that pressure social media platforms, advertisers etc. treat the two very differently. Yes, whites are generally the privileged group, but I don't think it's reasonable to say that excuses the type of behavior you're talking about happening on Twitter, and that sort of thing feeds into the conspiracy theories you'll find in places like Gab.

That's not the conversation I'm having.

Surely, you can see that a sustained effort to recruit for racist violence, and an ongoing celebration of racist violence, by people who have a history of racist violence, is not comparable to a joke about killing white people by someone who is not organizing to commit violence against white people or celebrating the death of or violence against innocent white people. The fact that you know enough about the situation to make that comparison, but still ask that question...means that I can't trust the sincerity of your question.

While I find statements like "kill all whites" to be hateful and unproductive, I'm certainly in agreement that such statements don't pose the same threat to whites as white supremacists ideologies pose to non-whites, largely based on the current power structures in the US and West. However I would caution you in your assumption that the same people who would "joke" about killing white people aren't also celebrating when death and violence is visited upon some innocent white person. From my experience there's certainly quite a bit of overlap between the two.

The specific instance of someone saying "kill all white people" on Twitter, at least the one I know of that caused a firestorm, I guess because its poster wasn't immediately banned forever by Twitter or whatever, was a joke by a white person. In poor taste? Sure. A credible threat or an incitement to real violence? Hardly. I will concede that sometimes "jokes" aren't really jokes...sometimes, they're the first step toward making an abhorrent idea a reality, and white supremacists know that and use it to their advantage by wrapping every evil intention up in a "it's just a joke, don't be so sensitive". Again, poor taste, sure, but not comparable to white supremacist gangs planning and celebrating murder.

I'm sure there are people who incite violence against white people, and people who would like to commit violence against white people. But, they don't have a voice in our society, whereas violent white supremacists do, and on a level they haven't in my lifetime. Just in the past week there have been three white supremacist terrorist attacks: 11 Jews dead in a shooting, 2 black folks killed in a shooting, and the unsuccessful bombing attacks. That didn't happen because those folks are white, it happened because they were perceived as being a threat to a particular way of life that has white folks on top.

Please don't make ad-hominem attacks, you're hurting HN as a community.

We're talking about more than just saying things here.

11 people have been murdered by a white supremacist, and Gab is the online community for white supremacists / neonazis / anti-semites, one of whom is the murderer, whose actions have been heavily influenced by the specific culture of that community. What does the white-people stuff you allegedly saw "on twitter" have to do with that?

Come on, really?

Gab is not the online community for white supremacists, that's just an absurd hyperbolic statement. I would downvote you if I could.

Are there others in the >100,000 users range?

You haven't even proven that Gab is a white supremacist site. It's not. That's simply a mudslinging accusation meant to unfairly defame a site, probably because it contains different opinions than your own.

You can easily find antisemitic tripe in Gab's official account. It's a site run by bigots for bigots that likes to pretend it's some neutral, principled free speech crusader. It's thoroughly, painfully obvious to any reasonable person that it's not - it's just a generic online septic tank.

I don't recall running into much antisemitic tripe when I was there.

Calling Gab a white supremactist website just seems like a ridiculous over-the-top assertion without even a shred of evidence to back it up... I don't get how this isn't being called out as a blatant ad hominem attack.

Well, their own tweets seemed to convince one HN user they were, at best, Nazi-adjacent so I'm happy to try again. Take a look at

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18318536

Hm, thanks for the link! Definitely ridiculously unprofessional Twitter account they have. I wouldn't call them Nazis based on those tweets alone though. But yeah that certainly doesn't reflect well on them.

I would say to you the same thing I said to your sibling- this is a tangential point.

Absolutely nothing in Twitter's policies supports your argument.

https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hateful-condu...

I find your point to be staggering.

Based on your name alone, are you really suggesting that you could engage online in the systematic advocacy of killing against whites in America, and face no consequences?

I guess you’re not exposed to mainstream media? I’m not very worried about the fate of white people in the US, but racism directed at whites is, as far as I can tell, perfectly acceptable discourse among the cultural elites. Might even get you a job at the New York Times.