Months before they cut ties with the extremist-friendly social-media site Gab, tech companies were warned about incitement to violence on the website, according to emails reviewed by The Daily Beast.
The payment processors Stripe and PayPal stopped working with Gab on Saturday after it was revealed that a man who allegedly murdered 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue had been an active Gab user who authored violently anti-Semitic posts and shortly before the killing spree, appeared to announce his intentions to his Gab followers. But over the summer Stripe and PayPal received warnings about the site's role in online hate.
The Twitter user @DeplatformHate has been documenting the far right's partnerships with Silicon Valley for nearly a year and repeatedly tweeted about Stripe's ties to Gab in August. After Stripe's general counsel reached out on August 17, Deplatform Hate sent him and Stripe's CEO a long email on August 24, documenting the issue.
"Gab is a massive hive mind of neo-Nazis that have actively doxed journalists families that work on stories of neonazi violence," Deplatform Hate wrote in an August 24 email shared with The Daily Beast, in which he cited white supremacists who used Gab to publish journalists' personal information, including home addresses.
Deplatform Hate shared the messages on the condition of anonymity, citing harassment by neo-Nazis.
One targeted journalist "had his mother in the Bronx get a bomb threat. You can muddy the story of 'oh but the first amendment'—you're a lawyer. You know that doesn't hold up in the US and that private companies can have moral systems if they're not discriminating against protected classes. Last time I checked, Nazis weren't a protected class."Stripe declined to comment on the email.
"For privacy reasons, we can't comment on individual users, but you can read our terms of service here, which should answer your direct question," a Stripe spokesperson told The Daily Beast.
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