In order to comply in good faith with the terms of service for the Chrome extension store and Mozilla’s add-on library for Firefox, Gab added a word filter to the Dissenter extension to automatically filter out certain words that Google or Mozilla might classify as hate speech”. Well, even with the filters in place, and even with a measure of moderation preventing certain kinds of language from proliferating through the commenting app, Google and Mozilla still banned the extension. Gab decided it was pointless to keep the filter in place, so they decided to remove it.
The news was picked up by Kotaku in Action who spotted the announcement from Gab over on their official Twitter account. The post on Twitter was made on April 18th, 2019.
For those who don’t know: it filtered 20 or so racial slurs from the extension to comply with “hate speech” policies of the extension app stores. It could also be turned off in the settings by users.
— Dissenter.com Gab.com (@getongab) April 19, 2019
Since Google and Mozilla decided to ban the app for no real reason, and refused to clarify what part of the terms of service that Dissenter actually violated, Gab decided to stop trying to filter content to meet their nebulous standards.
Also they pointed out that the usage of said words was limited to an extremely minuscule amount of users, noting that only several dozen users actually used such language and only 0.81% of the 600,000 comments on Dissenter contained the words on the filter list.
Here’s an interesting fact: only 0.81% of 600,000 Dissenter comments contained any of these words. So Google and Mozilla banned Dissenter for nearly 100,000 users over 0.81% of content on the entire platform posted by a few dozen users.
— Dissenter.com Gab.com (@getongab) April 19, 2019
You can see what words were filtered via an archived post, which detailed what they attempted to keep from showing up on Dissenter.
Given that Google and Mozilla have banned Dissenter from their app stores, Gab has publicly stated that they will create their own browser. With Gab attempting to toe the line for free speech, maybe someone can convince them to turn around their policies on the lolis and the shotas?
(Thanks for the news tip Ebicentre)
