What is Gab? A Bastion of Free Speech or an Alt-Right Echo Chamber?
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Over the past few years new "fringe" communities have been created and gained traction on the Web at a rapid rate. Very often little is known about how they evolve and what kinds of activities they attract, despite recent research has shown that they do influence how misinformation reaches mainstream communities. This motivates the need to monitor them and analyze their impact on the Web's information ecosystem. In August 2016, a new social network called Gab was created as an alternative to Twitter. It positions itself as putting "people and free speech first", welcoming users banned or suspended from other social networks. In this paper, we provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first characterization of Gab. We collect and analyze 22M posts produced by 336K users between August 2016 and January 2018, finding that Gab is predominantly used for the dissemination and discussion of news and world events, and that it attracts alt-right users, conspiracy theorists, and other trolls. We also measure the prevalence of hate speech on the platform, finding it to be much higher than on Twitter, but lower than 4chan's Politically Incorrect board.
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