Gab

Gab is a microblogging platform incorporated in Delaware on September 9, 2016 and launched as a private invite-only beta in August 2016. It describes itself as “the social network that champions free speech, individual liberty and the free flow of information online.” Andrew Torba has been its chief executive and sole director since inception; in a 2019 securities filing he reported owning over 84 percent of the company’s common stock and controlling roughly 85 percent of its voting power.

Unusually for a private company of its size, much of what is documented about Gab comes from Gab itself: in 2018-19 it attempted a Regulation A offering and filed an offering circular with the SEC, subject to disclosure obligations. That filing was withdrawn in March 2019, but it remains on the public record.

Reported scale

Gab told the SEC it had “over 835,000 cumulative registered users” as of December 13, 2018, of whom approximately 200,000 had logged in during the preceding 30 days — a distinction worth preserving, since cumulative registrations and active users differ by roughly a factor of four here. Gab also cautioned that VPN use limited its ability to confirm uniqueness. No more recent company-published figure was found, so larger numbers in circulation are third-party estimates.

Loss of vendor access and infrastructure independence

Gab’s own risk factors set out the exclusions that shaped the platform: “We have been repeatedly rejected from Apple’s App Store for what they deem to be ‘objectionable content.’ We were removed from Google’s Play Store for what they deem to be ‘hate speech.’” It also reported being forced to move to a new domain registrar over the same objection, and disclosed plans to establish its own hosting platform “to mitigate potential downtime from the cancellation of services from third party hosting platforms.” Gab noted the practical consequence: without app-store distribution, iOS users must reach it through a mobile browser, which the company identified as a constraint on growth.

This is the origin of the self-hosted infrastructure the platform later became known for — a response to vendor exclusion documented by the company at the time, rather than an initial design choice.

Pittsburgh synagogue shooting

Gab disclosed to the SEC that “as a result of postings on our platform by the alleged shooter in the tragic Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018, we and our founder received a significant amount of negative press,” and identified consequent risks including loss of subscribers and of third-party service providers. The company separately disclosed a subpoena from the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, which it said it did not believe would have an adverse effect.