A few decades ago I used to be in and out of the offices of the Sun newspaper at least three or four times weekly. I was most often delivering background copy files and pictures for the news agency I worked for, back in the days when electronic transmission of pictures was difficult and costly and when the Sun was still based in Bouverie Street.

What I saw impressed me a great deal. I perceived that even though I may not have liked the content or the style of the Sun newspaper, I recognised immediately the great talent of the Sun’s writers. Both the journalists themselves and the sub editors bench knew intimately what their customers wanted and how to craft stories that would most appeal to their audience. The Sun’s writers at the time seemed to skilfully understand what their audience wanted and the Sun and its immensely talented writers gave the audience what they wanted. The Sun’s writers knew that their customers wanted bingo, tits, crazy court stories, outrageous celeb and royal scandals and other stuff that would mostly make them laugh but also enrage them. It was this market knowledge that made them one of the best selling newspapers in the UK at the time with nearly four million copies sold each day.

However, the Sun of those glory days is but a pale shadow of its former self. A good example of this is the smear that the newspaper has published about the Gab platform. It is an article that is so desperate to shock and so pandering to the censoriousness of the social justice warriors that I believe that the article is counterproductive and will act as an effective advertisement for Gab and bring more users along.

Reading this article is like reading something that the Guardian would put out. The repeated use of ‘snarl’ words and phrases such as ‘far right’ and lame attempts to link Gab users who have and want nothing to do with violence, with neo-Nazi nutjobs, looks and reads both clumsy and desperate. It reminded me of some of the stuff Owen Jones puts out such is its obvious partisanship and hyperbole.

As could be expected the article concentrated on the loud but mostly ineffective National Socialist lunatics who I admit are to be found on Gab but they are there only because they’ve been kicked off of other platforms and because Gab has a free speech policy. There are, for the record other nutcases who also have a voice on Gab who come from the socialist and communist side and those with strange delusions about the Earth being flat. The article also made an attempt to tie genuine neo-Nazi nutters (who it must be remembered are both an absolute minority both in the UK and on Gab itself) with Gab and tried to make it seem as if Gab was specifically set up for these odious types. It was not until several paragraphs down that Gab’s founder Mr Andrew Torba or his policy of free speech as long as it complies with US law was mentioned.

There was of course, this being a smear piece, no mention of the large number of decent and non-extreme Gab users who use the platform and who either block the nutcases or argue and debate with them. Bad ideas are never defeated by sticking them in a sealed box or censoring them, which seems to be the gist of the Sun’s article, but by debating with them and sometimes mocking them.  The answer to bad speech is not more censorship, but more free speech in order to challenge bad ideas.

I believe that this article is so obviously and plainly a smear piece that it will perversely attract new users to Gab. Whilst there may be many readers who will be offended and angered at the small village of nutcases that live on Gab, there may be many more, especially those who read the full article and not just the first few paragraphs, who may be very attracted to the idea of a place for free speech. It’s quite possible that the Sun article will be counterproductive and will alert many Britons who support the idea of free speech and feel that censorship is closing in on them to the existence of the Gab platform. I have come to the conclusion that the Sun’s smear piece on Gab will have the complete opposite effect to the one intended and it’s the finger-wagging SJW tone of this article that will accomplish that. I doubt that either the writers or the sub editors of the Sun of the old days when it stood like a colossus over Fleet Street would have made such a major error as to accidentally turn a smear piece into an advertisement for the organisation that the paper is attempting to smear.