Mark Dice interviews Andrew Torba about Gab. Torba is the founder and CEO of Gab. Both Dice and Torba are conservative Christians (e.g. Torba even seems to follow Doug Wilson). Torba regards what's happening today with the left, big tech, social media, and the mainstream media as part of a spiritual war. I applaud and support what Torba is attempting to do with Gab: that is, make Gab the free speech alternative to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, reddit, various web browsers including Google Chrome. I pray for his success and the success of others (especially other Christians) like him. If he succeeds, I think it'll prove good for many people including Christians. Torba will need all the help he can get.
Watching it now. One bummer is he's white. Dang. Because of the January 6th I keep running across articles on Proud Boys, and it's always claimed the group is racist/white supremacist...unless they're talking about the guy at the top who has melanin.
ReplyDeleteWow, he did go build his own everything, it seems.
I think I first heard about Gab several years ago. Well before this election anyway. All I remember was hearing that they had a lot of white supremacists, KKK, neo-Nazis, etc. However, given what Torba says in the interview, I suspect that was the left trying to smear Gab.
DeleteAlthough I likewise suspect that if the left smeared Gab as a place for white supremacists, then ironically that itself may have attracted white supremacists!
However, even if there were white supremacists on Gab at the time, it's certainly no longer the case now. And even at worst Gab is no worse than Twitter or Facebook! Twitter literally has Chinese Communist Party sympathizers tweeting, anti-Semites like Ilhan Omar, and even verified pornographic accounts!
Yeah, when you google Gab, you at least get gab's website (I'm on it now, it seems), but you also get an article trumpeting those sorts of claims, and a Wikipedia article saying it as well.
DeleteIt's unfortunate we have maybe 3 or 4 tech companies that control the majority of the information that's available to the public. All of whom are partisan on behalf of the political left.
DeleteAnd all of whom will attempt to shut down any alternative voices like Parler and Gab. Aside from politics, this is highly unfair business practice.
It'd be good if more people used alternative privacy-focused apps including search engines. Restore Privacy might be a helpful website for people to start with.
Yeah, but when the rest suck (Bing? DuckDuckGo, which really uses Google, but just makes your requests more anonymous, and thus, unfortunately, the results less helpful?), it's quite difficult. And then as gets pointed out in the interview, once companies become the big dog, they push for legislation to shut out others. Sure, the laws are annoying for them, but already had 300 lawyers and 200 HR people who weren't doing anything, so they can make sure they're complying with laws. I interned at a startup in San Francisco. The president of the company talked to us. He basically said the plan was to take over the space they were working in and make it so others couldn't get in, though he didn't specify what means he would use to do so.
DeleteI, as you can see, always take the negative approach. Though I'm not saying nothing can be done, just that it's not easy.
Unfortunately that's true. Many of these are meta search engines.
DeleteAt least as far as I know, only Mojeek is a truly independent search engine with an index created by its own crawlers, but it's based in the UK, which is one of the Five Eyes nations, along with the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
DuckDuckGo is based in the US. Other search engines are based in other Five Eyes or Nine Eyes or Fourteen Eyes nations.
Getting a VPN service definitely helps (e.g. ProtonVPN, NordVPN, ExpressVPN, PIA, SurfShark), but even VPNs aren't 100% guaranteed to make one anonymous.
Of course, I'm not suggesting people shouldn't seek personal privacy online. I think those who wish to be private can do so. Nothing is 100% guaranteed, but I think it's possible to be "mostly" private even if not 100%.
DeleteIn addition to trying to distance myself from big tech companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, and so forth, I'm also currently looking into smartphones that aren't iPhones or Androids. So far as I can tell, Librem, PinePhone, and FairPhone sound promising.