Typing ‘Oven’ Into Gab Is Likely To Pull Up Conversations About Jews
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
Searching “oven” on forum-site Reddit will mostly call up threads on pizza. But doing the same on Gab, the site the alleged Pittsburgh synagogue shooter used to express anti-Semitic views, brings up “Jews,” “Holocaust” and “Hitler.”
Twitter user Jason Baumgartner, who owns a site dedicated to detecting hate speech on social media, analyzed “oven” as a search term on both platforms, taking into account 10,000 comments. He used two graphics to show the difference in results, which highlighted Gab’s anti-Semitic tendencies.
Two social media platforms. The search term was “oven.” 10,000 comments were analyzed. On the left is a word cloud for #Reddit data. On the right, #Gab data. Most frequent word associations are larger.
This is a problem.#gab #hatespeech #datascience #bigdata #dataviz pic.twitter.com/TQhXUKIzWk
— Jason Baumgartner (@jasonbaumgartne) November 6, 2018
The Gab graphic’s largest words, which equals the most association, are “Jews” and “Jews.” “Holocaust” and “Hitler” are also featured, recalling when Jews perished in ovens in concentration death camps.
The aforementioned gunman killed 11 at prayer last month in a synagogue.
Gab launched in 2016 as a “free-speech” alternative to Twitter, according to Reuters. It is a space commonly visited by alt-right activists and white nationalists whose views have been banned from other platforms.
Alyssa Fisher is a news writer at the Forward. Email her at [email protected], or follow her on Twitter at @alyssalfisher
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