90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Gab Goes Dark: GoDaddy, Paypal Pull Plug on Social Media Site

It’s getting more and more difficult to provide competition to social media companies, especially if they want to provide free speech, too.

Just ask Gab.ai, a social media site that was founded as a response to Twitter banned prominent pro-Trump voices. In the aftermath of the horrific Tree of Life massacre that took place on October 27, media complained about the shooter’s Gab account, where he posted anti-Semitic sentiment on a regular basis.

Tech companies and website providers began to cancel their relationships with Gab.ai in response. GoDaddy, Paypal, Stripe, Medium, and cloud-hosting provider Joyent stopped working with Gab.ai. Gab.ai suspended the site until further notice.

On the webpage, Gab founder Andrew Torba wrote, “We are the most censored, smeared, and no-platformed startup in history, which means we are a threat to the media and to the Silicon Valley Oligarchy.” He then said that “Gab isn’t going anywhere,” and proceeded to explain that while the site is now unavailable, the company is working to go back online as soon as possible.

The New York Times wrote that Robert Bowers, the alleged synagogue shooter, had found a “haven for white nationalists, neo-Nazis and other extremists” on Gab. The piece criticized Gab for not prohibiting “hateful speech” on its platform.

GoDaddy wrote in an email to Gab, “GoDaddy discovered numerous instances of content on your site that both promotes and encourages violence against people. Further, this content has remained on your site for months despite your own policies and terms of service.” Medium wrote that it “unequivocally disavows and condemns all acts of terrorism and violence.”

Meanwhile, Reverend Louis Farrakhan, the anti-Semitic leader of the Nation of Islam, is still very much active on Twitter after posting a video where he compared Jewish people to “termites.” Twitter even told a Buzzfeed reporter that Farrakhan was not in violation of Twitter’s policies against hate speech.

Wired wrote a defense of Gab, stating, “Threats of violence are illegal, but Gab says that it does its best to remove them.” The piece then argued that it is risky giving companies the power to de-platform free speech in the way that...

Trump told “Axios on HBO” that he has run the idea of ending birthright citizenship by his counsel and plans to proceed with the highly controversial move, which certainly will face legal challenges.

“It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment. Guess what? You don’t,” Trump said, declaring he can do it by executive order.

When told says that’s very much in dispute, Trump replied: “You can definitely do it with an Act of Congress. But now they’re saying I can do it just with an executive order.”

“We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States … with all of those benefits,” Trump continued. “It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. And it has to end.”

“It’s in the process. It’ll happen … with an executive order.”

The president expressed surprise that “Axios on HBO” knew about his secret plan: “I didn’t think anybody knew that but me. I thought I was the only one. “

Behind the scenes: “Axios on HBO” had been working for weeks on a story on Trump’s plans for birthright citizenship, based on conversations with several sources, including one close to the

White House Counsel’s office.

The legal challenges would force the courts to decide on a constitutional debate over the 14th Amendment, which says:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

If he does this it would be a bold move, and Democrats would go nuts.

It would certainly face court challenges and it does seem there are some potential legal issues with a President doing this by executive order.

Either way, this is certain to make waves a week before...

The FBI has published 3 reports that collectively detail active shooter events from 2000-2017. The first report covered events from 2000 to 2013, the second covered 2014-2015, and the third and most recent covered 2016-2017.

It is important to note that the FBI has no specific system in place for finding and cataloging active shooter events. They manually search for and include them in their reports the same way anyone else might Google it which of course means there is room for error particularly in missing events that should have been included.

The FBI definition of an Active Shooter event is: “One or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.”

A few important distinctions about the FBI definition of Active Shooter include:

A firearm must be used by the attacker. This then means they have not included incidents like the armed citizen who saved a woman outside the GM building in Detroit from a stabber or the man who was stopped by a CCWer in a Smiths Grocery store in Salt Lake City when he was stabbing shoppers at random.

Domestic incidents are not included. The FBI feels that an Active Shooter event has to be one in which the attacker is endangering strangers not only their own family members.

Gang-related violence is excluded also.

For the FBI to define an incident as an Active Shooter incident both law enforcement personnel and citizens have to have the potential to affect the outcome of the event based upon their responses to the situation.

So Is The FBI Data Complete?

Within the Active Shooter definition used by the FBI, it is broad enough that there are likely a large number of incidents that are being missed by the FBI. The Crime Prevention Research Center has taken the lead after each report has been published to identify events that should have been included that were missed. In some of those cases, the FBI has acknowledged their error but still never updated the list of events.

Lott found that there was a greater tendency to miss events from the first decade (2000 to 2010) than in more recent years. This is at least in part to the changes in technology and news reporting. In 2014 when the FBI did their first report it would have been difficult to search for and find Active Shooter events from the early 2000s. Lott suggests there may also have been some intentional bias in not reporting on some earlier events in order to show a greater increase in incidents over time.

So, for our own report that follows, we have included all of the FBI data but have also added a number of incidents that the FBI missed which were identified by the CPRC. Of the 282 Active Shooter events in our data pool; 247 of them come from the FBI's original reports while an additional 35 identified by the CPRC have been added. I carefully reviewed each of those 35 incidents to make sure they meet all the FBI Active Shooter criteria.
So What Does the Data Show?

This first chart simply shows the number of active shooter events over time. We believe the first 10 years or so reported are likely under-reported by the nature of how the data was compiled, but regardless one could arguably suggest that Active Shooter...