Name: Donald Trump’s Gab Account Uses an Email Address Belonging to the Extremist Platform’s CEO
Brand: theintercept.com
SKU: theintercept-com-275
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Donald Trump’s Gab Account Uses an Email Address Belonging to the Extremist Platform’s CEO

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Gab, the far-right social network that’s known as a safe space for hate speech, QAnon believers, Trump election fraud conspiracists, and , was . The site exploded in popularity after the January 6 insurrection when Amazon Parler, another social network used by right-wing extremists, offline, which caused Gab’s user base to explode from about&nbsp;1 million users to roughly&nbsp;4 million.The hacker made off with the email addresses and encrypted passwords of all&nbsp;4 million of the site’s users and the content of more than 39 million posts, including everything posted to 7,632 private groups, and leaked them to the radical transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets. On Monday, DDoSecrets the nearly 70&nbsp;gigabytes of hacked data to journalists and researchers. Gab’s CEO Andrew Torba has DDoSecrets of hacking Gab — a source provided DDoSecrets with the data, they didn’t hack it themselves — and then used an&nbsp; when posting about the group.Donald Trump’s Gab account.Screenshot: The InterceptFormer President Donald Trump’s verified Gab account was among those that were compromised (though the account’s description says it’s “reserved” for Trump, and Torba &nbsp;that Trump himself doesn’t use it). When I got my hands on the Gab data, the first thing I did was look up Trump’s account, and the first thing I noticed was the email address associated with it: Why was Trump using this obscure email address, and what is Kuhcoon?It turns out&nbsp;that Torba, the current CEO of Gab, is the former CEO and founder of Kuhcoon (later renamed Automate Ads, and acquired by AdHawk in 2017), a tech startup that offered automated Facebook ad campaigns. According to a , Torba started Kuhcoon in 2011 with his college roommate. The company received venture capital backing from Y Combinator in 2014; in August 2016, Torba stepped down as CEO, and he, along with his co-worker Ekrem Büyükkaya, Gab.Since it launched, Gab has been a haven for far-right extremists. Torba’s Gab account was created on August 10, 2016, and the next account created later that day was for the “alt-right” personality Milo Yiannopoulos. Other extremists who created early accounts include anti-feminist conspiracist Mike Cernovich and prominent neo-Nazi Richard Spencer (best known for getting at Trump’s inauguration in 2017). The accounts on Gab that have the most followers on the whole platform include unhinged QAnon-sympathizing Republican&nbsp;Reps.&nbsp;Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert and personalities like Alex Jones. of the 20 most popular Gab groups are devoted to Trump and QAnon.Trump’s account is the only&nbsp;one on Gab that uses an email address from kuhcoon.com. I sent an email to , but the email bounced.Torba didn’t reply to my email requesting his comment, but he did publicly tweet a response from Gab’s Twitter account, stating, “As per my policy of not communicating with non-Christian and/or communist journos, I will not be replying to this non-story,” and, “It’s not a real email address, therefore it is not checked.”He then mentioned me to make sure I’d see it:Disclosure: I’m on the DDoSecrets advisory board.Update:&nbsp;The story has been updated to make it&nbsp;clear that&nbsp;Torba has been open about the fact that Trump&nbsp;does not use&nbsp;the @realdonaldtrump Gab account.

Gab, the far-right social network that’s known as a safe space for hate speech, QAnon believers, Trump election fraud conspiracists, and , was . The site exploded in popularity after the January 6 insurrection when Amazon Parler, another social network used by right-wing extremists, offline, which caused Gab’s user base to explode from about&nbsp;1 million users to roughly&nbsp;4 million.The hacker made off with the email addresses and encrypted passwords of all&nbsp;4 million of the site’s users and the content of more than 39 million posts, including everything posted to 7,632 private...

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Micah Lee

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Donald Trump’s Gab Account Uses an Email Address Belonging to the Extremist Platform’s CEO

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