Jake Tapper Hit With Hitler Memes After Signing Up for the Alt-Right’s Gab Social: ‘It Is a Cesspool of Hate’ (Video)
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It has the “lowest standards” of any social media platforms, but even Gab moderates its content,” CNN anchor Jake Tapper noted in a lengthy report on far-right social sites Monday.
Tapper signed up for Gab Social after Parler announced it would sell itself to Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West. That sale, Tapper said, would make Ye “the latest billionaire to buy his way into the ‘Social Media Legion of Doom,'” alongside former President Donald Trump, who owns Truth Social, and Elon Musk, who is in the process of buying Twitter.
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Ye moved to purchase the site, which bills itself as “the world’s pioneering uncancelable free speech platform,” after he was locked out of Twitter and Instagram following a number of antisemitic posts.
After detailing Parler’s history and its use as an organizing tool by many of the insurgents who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Tapper said that while site now markets itself as “the premier global free speech platform,” Gab has about 10 times more users.
So he decided to take a look, and opened an account on Monday.
“I clicked on ‘explore,’ which took me to popular posts across Gab,” he said. “I came in with an open mind, and immediately Gab hit me with this post: ‘We are in a war time, but it’s a quiet war perpetrated by the Jew.'” The meme featured a photo of Adolf Hitler.
“And there was plenty more where that came from,” said Tapper, who is Jewish.”The N-word is super big on Gab. It is a cesspool of hate.”
But while it doesn’t stop people from posting hate, Gab does moderate content, as does Parler and Truth Social, Tapper noted. Gab “does not just allow any speech. It takes precautions,” he said.
“You can’t transmit unwanted advertising or promotional material on Gab,” he said. “You can’t impersonate someone else on Gab. You can’t do anything that might cause Gab itself to be harassed on Gab.
What it didn’t do was remove posts targeting Jews by the suspect who killed 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. He was posting “right up until the moment he got out of his car and went into slaughter innocent Jews,” Tapper said.
Tapper concluded with clips from Congressional hearings that suggested that elected officials are out of touch with how social media operates, and suggested there’s little hope that legislation might weed out hate speech online.
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And while Tapper said he traditionally supports the concept that countering bad speech is best done with “more speech” and “not with censorship,” he labeled the dilemma over how to address racist posts on social media a “conundrum.”
“The ‘more speech’ I saw on Gab this afternoon, was more speech extolling Nazis and more speech engaging in Holocaust denial and more speech sharing more hideously racist posts than I’ve ever seen in one place in my life,” Tapper said.
“I saw less of it, but still too much of it on Parler today,” he added. “It’s high time we recognize that the hate on many of these far right sites is not just an unfortunate result of belief in free speech. The hate is the whole point.”
Watch the full segment in the video above.
