When young conservatives arrive at Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit at President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in West Palm Beach, Florida, today they’ll be doing so without seeing advertisements for Gab.
Gab is a social media site modeling Twitter that bills itself as the home of free speech online, citing its incredibly lax and rarely enforced content moderation guidelines. The platform is almost exclusively populated with conspiracy theorists and right-wing extremists, which is largely by design and due to the fact that Gab was birthed into the tech world when far-right figures and white nationalists began receiving Twitter suspensions after violence took place at the “Unite the Right” white supremacist gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year.
In other words, it might not be the kind of environment many parents would hope their teenagers spend their time exploring.
As recently as last week, Gab was promoted as a sponsor of the Student Action Summit, which invites “student activists between the ages of 15 and 25” to receive political activism training and hear from right-wing speakers. As recently as December 8, TPUSA listed Gab as a sponsor for the event, displaying the Gab logo among those of other sponsoring organizations, including those of The Heritage Foundation, Alliance Defending Freedom, the Leadership Institute and Dennis Prager’s propaganda mill, Prager University. According to Gab’s statement, TPUSA quietly dropped the company last week.
On Monday, Gab posted the following press statement:
Press release regarding our sponsorship of the @TPUSA Student Action Summit. pic.twitter.com/VsQrPzt4wN
— Gab.com☃️ (@getongab) December 17, 2018
“We even sent a check,” a Gab representative writes. “Unfortunately, last week our logo was suddenly pulled from the Summit’s event website without explanation, and attempts to get one went unanswered.”
Predictably, the responses to the statement seen on Gab included racist rhetoric directed at TPUSA Communications Director Candace Owens, who is a black woman, and posts asking whether TPUSA was being secretly orchestrated by Jews.
TPUSA and Gab did not return our requests for comment.
