by John Dougherty and Michael Edison Hayden
Three months after a
man radicalized on Gab.com killed 11 Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue, the
social media website that has become a hub for white nationalists and
neo-Nazis remains financially viable thanks to an Obama-era law and an
online crowdfunding broker, a Hatewatch investigation reveals.
The JOBS Act
of 2012 was designed to help startup companies use crowdfunding to
raise up to $1.07 million a year. The law has allowed Gab’s parent
company, Gab AI, Inc., to raise $2 million since 2017 from two
crowdfunding rounds handled by StartEngine Crowdfunding, Inc.,
a Los Angeles securities brokerage firm that helps companies prepare
regulatory filings and sell investment shares to the public.
A handful of investors – 1,000 in 2017 and 1,900 in 2018 – purchased
$1 million of highly speculative securities in Gab through StartEngine,
providing the company enough capital to allow it to continue to operate.
Revenue has otherwise been scarce. Payment processors like PayPal and
Stripe dropped Gab in the aftermath of the Oct. 27, 2018, terror attack
at the Tree of Life Synagogue, causing a 90 percent drop in
subscription revenue from premium services, Gab stated in a Dec. 19
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing.
The company was relying on snail mail and cryptocurrency to sell premium subscription services, but announced on Tuesday it formed a relationship with an obscure company called 2nd Amendment Processing to help with future credit card payments.
Click here for the full article.
Source: The Southern Poverty Law Center
No comments:
Post a Comment