(2019-07-11) Mastodon Was Designed To Be A Nazifree Twitter Now Its Home To Gab Vice

Mastodon Was Designed to Be a Nazi-Free Twitter. Now It's Home to Gab. Mastodon was launched as a decentralized, social justice friendly Twitter alternative that was free of Nazis and harassment. But two years later, the biggest Mastodon instance is now Gab, a far-right social media network known widely as a gathering space for white supremacists

Gab—which has been tied to the suspect responsible for the Pittsburgh synagogue terror attack that killed 11 worshippers—announced on July 4 that it had switched its backend to run on Mastodon’s software, instantly making it the largest Mastodon user, with more than double the number of users as the next largest federation

Mastodon released a statement denouncing Gab for using its tool and claimed it will do everything in its power to isolate the site. It also said some servers in its “Fediverse” were blocking Gab domains, meaning Gab can't interact with them

In one post, a Gab user and member of a known militant network—which once comprised hundreds of Gab profiles across approximately five groups in Canada, the US, South Africa, and Europe—explicitly calls for followers to target the electric grid. The groups are connected to the broader Atomwaffen Division and its affiliated network, which is a well-known American hate group connected to five killings in the US. Several posts connected to the same network on Gab are even more explicit, calling on sympathizers to join local neo-Nazi affiliates and commit violence against Jewish and Muslim communities

The FBI also pointed Motherboard to congressional testimony from last month by its Deputy Director of Counterterrorism, Michael McGarrity, who highlighted the internationalization of white nationalist terrorism and the use of social media as a vector of radicalization leading to violence.

Gab denied that neo-Nazi terror groups are thriving on its site and said it swiftly bans any militant acitivities it sees on its site, and it removed posts identified to it by Motherboard.