Free Speech Social Media Platform Gab Banned by Three Banks in Three Weeks

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Social media platform Gab has been banned by three banks in three weeks due to negative press reports about the company, according to founder and CEO Andrew Torba.

One of the banks told Torba his institution could no longer do business with the company because of “all the bad things the press has written about Gab,” something Torba objects to.

“Gab follows the law and operates a legal business in the United States,” Torba told National File this week. “We sell hats, shirts, and a software license to our GabPRO service. We have a community that respects law and order. Yet we have banks and other services banning us left and right.”

Torba, a veteran of the tech industry who left silicon valley over the industry’s censorship of conservatives and conservative views, founded Gab as an alternative social media platform in 2016. In the years since then it has been banned from both the Apple and Google app stores.

In 2018 Gab was banned by digital payment platform PayPal, a blow for a company that relies on subscriptions to its pro-service to cover operating expenses (standard service is free for users).

Last year not only was the platform banned by Visa, but Torba and his family were banned by the company as well.

“We were told this week that not only is Gab blacklisted by Visa as a business, but my personal name, phone number, address, and more are all also blacklisted by Visa. If I wanted to leave Gab tomorrow (something that isn’t going to happen) and start a lemonade stand I wouldn’t be able to obtain merchant processing for it,” Torba wrote in a blog post last year. “Simply because my name is Andrew Torba.”

“If my wife wants to start a business she won’t be able to obtain merchant processing because she lives at the same address as me and would be flagged by Visa.”

“This is obviously very concerning. We have done nothing wrong. Gab is and always has been a legally operated business. We sell hats, shirts, and a software subscription service that unlocks new features on Gab. My personal credit score is in the 800’s. I pay my bills. I have a wife and daughter to provide for, yet we are all being punished and defamed because someone at Visa has it out for me,” he added.

In addition to the ban, Visa placed a monitor on Gab who alerted the company whenever a new payment processor was added. And if a new one was added the monitor was to alert Visa immediately.

“We were told that Visa has someone camping on our website watching our payment processing. As soon as we get a new processor up they find out who it is on their end and contact them. They tell the processor that Gab is flagged for ‘illegal activity’ and if they do not stop processing payments for us they will be heavily fined,” Torba said.

When processors inquire with Visa as to the nature of the “illegal activity” being alleged they are told it’s “hate speech.” While Torba denies that his site is a haven for hate speech, it is also important to note that hate speech is not a legal term in the U.S. Indeed, it would seem hate speech is now whatever social media platforms and the people who control them say it is.

The banning of digital payments makes the banning from the banks this week all the more troublesome. Gab has been accepting bank checks from users who want to upgrade to their pro service or who simply want to make donations to the platform.

Shortly after the results of the presidential election were certified by the U.S. Congress major tech firms began what some described as a purge of conservatives from their platforms. The bans began with President Trump but extended quickly to everyday users as well.

Since that time Gab’s user base as skyrocketed with monthly hits increasing by triple-digit percentages. In January alone the site received 272 million visits – more than NBC News, The Wall Street Journal, Breitbart, TMZ or the Huffington Post.

Creating the site and getting it to the stage it’s at today has been difficult Torba says. But, he says, creating an infrastructure outside of the big tech oligarchy and the current political establishment that enables it, or at the very least is impotent against it, is the only way to defeat it.

“What we need to do is decentralize the movement and have a million Donald Trumps at every state, local, country, town level, becoming mayors, becoming a part of the state legislatures and becoming a part of the school boards,” Torba told Steve Bannon’s Warroom broadcast recently.

“We can’t control what’s going on in D.C. but we can control what’s going on in our own backyard.”

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