‘Alt-Right Twitter’ Gab Moves to Bitcoin Payments Due to Banking Blacklist
Upstart social network Gab has occasionally been dubbed the “alt-right Twitter .” A haven for mainstream social media castaways like Milo Yiannopoulos and even Alex Jones, the years-long spike in extremist right-wing terrorism has led to a backlash within the banking community toward sites which are seen to foster the ideology behind some acts of violence. For Gab’s part, they state that they do not openly encourage or discourage hate speech. They aim to be a neutral platform which allows the users to determine the type of content that should be on the platform so long as it follows a very narrow set of rules.
They haven’t found themselves in a favorable media spotlight in some time. Their last introduction to the reading public was as the favored platform of the Pittsburgh extremist right wing terrorist who killed 11 people in a Synagogue, Robert Bowers.
According to Gab founder Andrew Torba , Gab is now having payment processing issues. They’ve had acceptance from several processors, but the banks that have a lot of sway with these processors have allegedly refused to allow business from Gab. This is similar to the way the Daily Stormer was banned from PayPal, as CCN.com earlier reported, and resorted to Bitcoin and Monero a couple years ago, with surprising results.
There weren’t a lot of details as to the reasoning given for Gab’s denials. It seems easy to presume that businesses like Stripe and PayPal are simply not interested in being associated with Gab due to its reputation, particularly following the association of Gab and domestic terrorist acts. Torba said that “Coinbase has already banned us” and gives that as a reason for choosing BitPay. Luckily for him, BitPay and every other Bitcoin provider could ban them, and they’d still have plenty of options for processing payments with cryptocurrencies.
CCN.com will follow this story in order to see if BitPay reacts in kind, extending service to Gab, or if they join the crowd and also decide not to allow Gab to easily process payments. One thing is for sure: adding a network of tens of thousands of users who have a need to pay in cryptos will not be a bad thing for BitPay or cryptos generally. On the business side for Gab, they’ll have various new stablecoin options as a means to protect their earnings from volatility, although if they’re having banking problems, they could ultimately have problems cashing out in the traditional way.
Andrew Torba Image from PAHomepage.com/YouTube
