Everyone,It is with some exasperation that the team at Gab issues this brief statement on today's article in the Washington Post about our company, which mischaracterizes both our mission and what it means to have a right to freedom of speech, online or anywhere else. Gab.com operates according to one principal rule: if speech is allowed under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and our User Guidelines, it is allowed on our site. This is because, per Sir Stephen Sedley in the seminal English free speech case DPP v. Redmond-Bate, “freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having." On a daily basis, our company uses the protection afforded by the First Amendment, federal data privacy law, and American global hegemony to provide a utility for users all over the world, wheresoever they might be, to publish their innermost thoughts and engage in open dialogue without fear of recrimination from unfriendly and repressive governments. Put another way, we structure our affairs to afford all our users the full measure of due process rights available in the United States. 
As a result, Gab is now the fastest-growing social media platform in the world. We have acquired nearly a million users and new Gabbers are joining the site at a rate of nearly 100,000 a month from across the planet. 
One unintended consequence of our moderation policy is that Gab has attracted, shall we say, a colorful user base. Most if not all of the team, from the CEO down to our external contractors and service providers, can find an enormous amount of content on the site which we each find morally or politically objectionable, even personally hateful. However, we understand that adopting a moderation policy that mirrors the First Amendment will result in users of our site expressing views with which we disagree, including "the thought that we hate." See Matal v. Tam, 582 U.S. ___ (2017). We do not, unlike virtually every other social media company in existence, think we have any right to try to change what our users think. 
The WaPo piece strongly implies that Gab's provisioning of a forum for this speech runs the risk of encouraging expression "(escalating) from online speech to real-world action." We dissent. Hateful speech may be found on every platform with millions of users, including Twitter and Facebook; Gab is not alone in this regard. 
Furthermore, we actively monitor the site for speech that crosses the line from the merely outrageous into the truly threatening or unlawful. Where criminal activity is brought to our attention, we act swiftly to curtail it and, where possible, cooperate with law enforcement to ensure our users' safety - real, physical, safety, not wishy-washy millennial "safe space" safety - is secured.
When one creates a space where controversial speech is permitted, controversial speech should be expected. This is only news for anyone who doesn't understand what "free speech" actually means. And today, Gab stands as the largest social network in the world that willing to take the heat involved in standing by this oldest and most classically liberal principle of liberal democracy. 
Much has been made recently of social media companies' moderation policies seeking to strike balances between civility and liberty. Civility-oriented moderation strategies are referred to as the "European tradition" and liberty-oriented strategies are referred to as the "American tradition." 
We follow the American tradition to the letter. We will continue to do so as long as the company exists. 
Yours sincerelyGab.com