Monday, October 29, 2018

Months Before Pittsburgh Shooting, Stripe and PayPal Were Warned About Gab


A Daily Beast Exclusive

Two payment processors were told over the summer that neo-Nazis used the site to intimidate critics. The companies kept working with the site until 11 people were murdered.

By Kelly Weill

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. 

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