I used to be a reader of Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper. It used to be a favourite of mine when I was starting my journey away from the Left and towards the Centre Right. I found at the time that it had comprehensive home and foreign news and its comment and letters pages contained a wide variety of conservative opinions, some of which I agreed with and some with which I didn’t.

Eventually I abandoned the Telegraph as it went more and more to the Left over the course of a few years. A lot of the Home coverage was slavishly slanted towards the Tories even when the Tories were being the polar opposite of conservative and the foreign coverage seemed to suffer from being cobbled together from wire reports rather than having a ‘man on the ground’ where the stories were happening. But for me what made me stop taking the Telegraph was the comment pages. Where once these pages contained thoughtful commentators now to me they seemed to contain and feature more commentators from the middle class Left. I started to think ‘what’s the difference these days between the Telegraph’s comment pages and that of the Guardian?’ As I could see an increasing similarity between the comment pages of the Telegraph and the Guardian, I saw no reason to continue to purchase the Daily Telegraph.

It seems that the Telegraph has continued its downhill path into slavishly going along with whatever the Left want and that is no more apparent than in a blog post put out by Andrew Torba the CEO of the Gab platform. Mr Torba received a communication from a journalist at the Telegraph that seemed to suggest that the Telegraph is or was working on a hit piece about Gab.

The communication that Mr Torba received was riddled with grammar errors that even I, the product of an education system demeaned by the very worst of grammar-free Plowdenism would look askance at and definitely pointed towards the Telegraph plotting some form of hit piece about Gab. However what I want to highlight today, is not the piss poor excuse for journalism that the Telegraph will accept these days, but Mr Torba’s reply to the journalist. Quite frankly Mr Torba ripped the Telegraph ‘journalist’ a new arsehole and did it with some style.

I’m only going to give a few extracts from Mr Torba’s reply as his communication with the Telegraph journo is so good that I would advise readers to read the original which can be found here:

Mr Torba said:

Tomorrow morning I will be publishing this exchange in full on The Corrupt Press section of the Gab News blog. Next I will email it to millions of people as is Gab’s standard protocol when dealing with the corrupt and failing mainstream media. 

With this in mind, let me kindly address your vague and ambiguous concerns about random user generated content on Gab. 

Mr Torba then went on to highlight the double standards that exist in media and on social media where leftists who engage in hatred of White people are allowed to thrive on the legacy social media platforms like Twitter whilst their opponents are chased off of these platforms. Mr Torba also highlighted how his Christian beliefs fuelled his belief in liberty and free speech and continued to draw a comparison between Gab and other platforms and said that unlike other platforms Gab treats its users like adults.

Mr Torba added:

Gab seeks to export the uniquely American and Christian value of liberty to the entire world. 

Regardless of whether Gab’s administrators, outside activist pressure groups, “cancel culture” Internet mobs, the mainstream media (i.e. people like you,) foreign governments, or any other persons agree with any Gabber’s viewpoints: political speech that is protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution will be allowed on the platform. Illegal activity, threats of violence, doxxing, pornography, child exploitation, and spam are not allowed on Gab.

Part of having millions of users create and share content is that something somewhere is going to offend someone somewhere. Part of being an adult is learning how to use the block button or continue scrolling.

I find very little to disagree with about Mr Torba’s description of Gab as being a neutral free speech space and I also do not disagree that anything that anyone says is going to be ‘offensive’ to someone. One of the things that I like about Gab and indeed other similar platforms is that I can curate my own experience. If I want to read and laugh at the ravings of a flat earther or someone who believes that there’s a malevolent Jew hiding under their bed then I can do so, if I don’t then I can mute or block them and move on to converse with those whom I do want to speak to. To be quite frank I’d rather be my own social media curator than have someone else do that job for me. Others, such as journalists from a once great newspaper, seem to believe otherwise and consider self curation not just wrong but evil. The Telegraph used to be a paper worth reading but now they seem to be engaging in the same attacks on freedom of speech as the Guardian do. To be reduced to writing hit pieces about Gab is a sad end to a paper that was once genuinely and generally conservative.