CEO of social media app Gab: ‘What we’re seeing right now is the rise of communism, plain and simple’

“I had very close relationships inside of Facebook, Twitter, and Google,” he said. “So I got to see really the evils of their business model up close and personal for many years.”

By Josh Plank, World Israel News

Following the ban of President Donald Trump and thousands of his supporters from Twitter and Facebook, Gab CEO Andrew Torba said that people all over the world are terrified of big tech censorship, causing them to flee the social media giants in favor of free speech alternatives like Gab and Parler.

“We’ve never seen this type of growth in the company’s history,” said Torba in an interview with Pennsylvania’s WBRE-TV, which was posted on his Gab account Tuesday.

Torba said that Gab has gained up to 600,000-700,000 new community members daily since last week’s Capitol protests. He said the spike in membership is “unprecedented” since the company’s founding in 2016. According to Torba, 40 million people have visited the site this week alone.

Torba said that people all over the world are terrified with “what these big tech Silicon Valley oligarchs are doing.”

”They’re seeking a place to speak freely,” he said.

“Free speech has never been more important. The free flow of information has never been more important,” said Torba.

“What we’re seeing in America right now is the rise of communism, plain and simple. If you study history, you can see many parallels between different communist regimes that have risen up throughout history to what is happening right here in the United States of America, right now today,” he said.

Torba said this “communist uprising” is headed by billionaire elites who think that they own and run the U.S. He said that any critics are silenced, including the president and the 75 million Americans who support him.

As happened with the Parler app recently, the Gab app has been removed from both the Apple and Google app stores since 2017.

The company has also been banned from Visa, Stripe, PayPal, and other payment services. It has been forced to turn to the use of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which Torba calls “free speech money.”

Amazon also kicked Gab off its web-hosting service, as it recently did to Parler.

“All in all, we’ve been banned from probably 25-30 different service providers that you need to just exist on the internet and run a website,” Torba said.

In response, Gab bought its own servers. “We own them. We cannot be banned from them. That’s how you’re going to take back control of the internet,” Torba said.

“We will build the free speech internet that is grounded in American law and First Amendment free speech protections for everyone around the world, if we have to do it from the ground up,” he said.

Before starting Gab, Torba was involved with a digital advertising company in Silicon Valley.

“I had very close relationships inside of Facebook, Twitter, and Google,” he said. “So I got to see really the evils of their business model up close and personal for many years.”

Fed up with the rise of censorship on the social media platforms, Torba decided to start his own.

“The left and Silicon Valley and the media like to say if you don’t like what big tech is doing, go build your own. So that’s exactly what I did,” Torba said.