# Inside the Right-Leaning Echo Chambers: Characterizing Gab, an Unmoderated Social System

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.03688 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03688/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jul 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

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- [Rationalizing Predictions by Adversarial Information Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06009/) (2023)
- [Beyond the "Truth": Investigating Election Rumors on Truth Social During the 2024 Election](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04631/) (2026)
- [Going Extreme: Comparative Analysis of Hate Speech in Parler and Gab](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11770/) (2022)
- [Reproducibility Report: Contextualizing Hate Speech Classifiers with Post-hoc Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11412/) (2021)
- [The "Right" Discourse on Migration: Analysing Migration-Related Tweets in Right and Far-Right Political Movements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21220/) (2025)
- [Quantifying Political Partisanship for Cross-Platform Analyses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21842/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The moderation of content in many social media systems, such as Twitter and Facebook, motivated the emergence of a new social network system that promotes free speech, named Gab. Soon after that, Gab has been removed from Google Play Store for violating the company's hate speech policy and it has been rejected by Apple for similar reasons. In this paper we characterize Gab, aiming at understanding who are the users who joined it and what kind of content they share in this system. Our findings show that Gab is a very politically oriented system that hosts banned users from other social networks, some of them due to possible cases of hate speech and association with extremism. We provide the first measurement of news dissemination inside a right-leaning echo chamber, investigating a social media where readers are rarely exposed to content that cuts across ideological lines, but rather are fed with content that reinforces their current political or social views.