Recently, I stumbled upon a Facebook post shown below written by Landon Self, Chair of the Pflugerville Republican Youth Club. A self-proclaimed conservative who, oddly enough, was calling for a banning of Gab in his organization, adding that “Gab is [run] by garbage human beings.” This post came just hours after Texas Governor Greg Abbott released a press release stating, “anti-Semitic platforms like Gab have no place in Texas!” The statement is somewhat confusing given that the owner of Gab is a devout Christian who has not expressed any hostile sentiments towards the Jewish community. What Abbott and Self are referring to, and taking issue with, are the individual users of Gab. To disavow a platform because ‘Pepe the Frog’ is clearly trolling you does not make much sense to me.
Alleged conservatives, like Self, will post about how absurd it is that Mr. Potato Head is now gender-neutral, then turn around and demand action be taken against a website because one of the online users triggered them. What’s crazy is that conservatives are not even trying to ban speech or websites that attack their own identity or beliefs; only those that do not. Twitter was the first major tech platform to censor, and ultimately delete, President Trump’s account; Facebook places anti-White slurs as a lower priority than the placement of slurs against other races; Google banned Parlor from the PlayStore due to the influence conservatives were gaining. Do conservatives call for a boycott of Twitter, Facebook, and Google? I am sure many do, and some may even follow-through; however, I have seen far more official Republican pages on those sites than I do on Gab.
As of writing this, Gab does not censor Christians or conservatives; in fact, Gab does not really censor anyone that they do not legally have to. Is this not what conservatives and Republicans have been fussing about the past 6 years? Look, you finally have a platform that you can feel represented in, and you can stop using websites that hate you! “No, thank you!” the Republican boldly states. “I don’t like how Gab allows so much free speech. Some of it is untrue, and other posts even hurt my feelings!” Do online trolls say outlandish and offensive things? Of course — this is the internet. The wonderful part about social media is that even if you strongly disagree with the posts you see from a particular user, you can just block them and go about your day as if they do not exist.
Do we really live in a world where conservatives reject a pro-Christian social media site because of troll accounts and then embrace anti-Christian and anti-conservative social media sites as an alternative? At this rate, the only place for absolute free speech is going to be in a Modern Warfare 2 game lobby.
