Gab’s Twitter account deactivated after CEO reportedly uses Nazi term and dismisses antisemitism accusations as “Biblical truth” 

Gab’s Twitter account has been deactivated after its CEO reportedly tweeted about “Judeo-Bolshevik” societies and dismissed accusations of antisemitism levelled against him as “Biblical truth”. 

Gab is a social-media platform that was founded in 2016 with a claim to “champion free speech,” and has become a haven for supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory and other far-right groups and individuals banned from mainstream platforms.

Gab’s founder, Andrew Torba, was accused of antisemitism yesterday after he reportedly posted a string of tweets containing inflammatory remarks about Jewish people, including one which said that Gab was building a “parallel Christian society” after being “fed up and done with the Judeo-Bolshevik one”. 

The term “Judeo-Bolshevism” is an antisemitic trope that was used in Nazi propaganda and states that communism is a Jewish plot. 

Responding to the backlash to his tweet, Mr Torba appeared to double-down and continued tweeting. “Sadly many Christians today are so afraid of being called a silly meaningless name by the world (bigot, antisemite, homophobe) that they refuse to even remotely share or discuss the Gospel in their daily lives, let alone live it,” one post read.

Another tweet said: “Can’t even post basic Christian orthodoxy held for 2,000 years on Twitter dot com without being called ‘antisemitic’ by both the left and right.”

“You reveal your anti-Christian hatred when you refer to Biblical truth as ‘antisemitism’,” another post said in response to an accusation of antisemitism.

Mr Torba reportedly also posted two graphics. One, which was reported to have originated from an antisemitic cartoonist, depicts the nail in the hand of Christ, with the nail being labelled “Judeo” and the hand being labelled “Christian”. Another showed a man slaying a serpent with many heads, with one of those heads being labelled “Judaism”.

Responding to a tweet in which a user stated that Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ was “one of the most antisemitic films in history”, portrayed Jews as “grotesque and eternally cursed with bloodlust for money”, and refused to consult any Jewish scholars, the Gab account wrote: “What a king”

There has been some speculation as to whether Mr Torba’s account was deleted or whether he deactivated it himself in order to avoid a suspension, which he has reportedly done before. When one user allegedly notified Twitter of the posts, he was reportedly told by the social media platform that they were not in violation of the Twitter rules. 

This is not the first time that Gab has tweeted incendiary remarks about Jewish people. In July, Gab’s Twitter account was suspended after tweeting that antisemitism is “anything Jews don’t like.”

While Gab proclaims to be “pro-free speech,” others have described the network as racist and alleges that it promotes several conspiracy theories. Earlier this year, Andrew Torba was accused of wooing far-right figures to his platform with promises of greater visibility.

Far-right figures have turned to sites such as Gab to avoid restrictions on hate-content on more mainstream platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Mr Torba has tried to distance Gab from the far-right groups that have made it their home. In 2018, on a podcast, he said: “Do we have alt-right users? Certainly. Alt-right users also exist on Facebook, on Twitter, on Reddit, and everywhere else on the Internet.” He went on to insist that Gab had “good people” who “believe in individual liberty…and free expression.”

Campaign Against Antisemitism has long called for tougher regulations on social media sites and that social networks proactively search for and remove hate speech from their platforms.