The Cost Was Personal Too

Those costs were never limited to servers, payment processors, lawyers, or lost business relationships. My family has lived with the consequences of my decision to build Gab for ten years. We have been doxxed, threatened, harassed, and forced to think about things that most families should never have to think about simply because I built a website and refused to abandon it. I made the decision to start Gab; my family didn’t, and watching the consequences of that decision spill over onto my wife and children and extended family has always been the hardest part of this journey. There were moments when walking away would have made our lives much easier, but my family stood by me through all of it, and their sacrifice is as much a part of Gab’s story as anything I have personally endured. I will never be able to properly repay them for that.

As Gab grew, the censorship pressure increasingly came not only from technology companies and activist organizations, but from governments themselves. Authorities and regulators in countries including Germany, the United Kingdom, and Australia have pursued increasingly aggressive approaches to online speech, and the implications of these systems do not necessarily remain confined within their own borders. When governments pressure American technology companies to police speech according to foreign standards, they are effectively attempting to export their censorship regimes into the American digital public square.

Gab has consistently pushed back against that idea because there is a principle here much larger than our company. We reject the notion that foreign bureaucrats should be able to dictate what Americans may lawfully say on an American platform. We did not spend years fighting Silicon Valley censorship only to hand the same power to government officials overseas, nor do we believe technology companies should voluntarily transform themselves into enforcement arms for every government that invents a sufficiently broad definition of harmful speech.

This distinction is becoming increasingly important because the architecture of the Internet does not respect national boundaries in the way traditional media once did. If every country’s censorship laws are allowed to dictate what an American platform can display globally, the practical result will eventually be that the most restrictive government determines what everyone is allowed to say. We believe the proper response is exactly the opposite: defend lawful expression, resist attempts to impose extraterritorial censorship, and force governments to justify their demands through legitimate legal processes rather than expecting technology companies to obediently police political speech on their behalf.

There is one part of this story that I cannot leave out because it is impossible for me to honestly explain how I made it through the past ten years without talking about my faith in Jesus Christ. There were moments when the company was under enormous pressure, when the media attacks seemed endless, when infrastructure was disappearing underneath us, when my family was being dragged into something they never asked for, and when I had no obvious reason to believe that things were going to work out. Through those moments my faith gave me something much more important than confidence in a particular business outcome: it reminded me that I was not ultimately in control and that my responsibility was to remain faithful, do the work placed in front of me, protect my family, stand for what I believed was right, and trust God with the outcome.

My faith has also changed enormously over the course of these ten years. Trials have a way of stripping away the shallow version of Christianity that is easy to maintain when everything is comfortable. When the world is applauding you, faith can remain theoretical. When doors are closing, people are attacking you, your reputation is being destroyed in public, your family is paying a price, and you genuinely do not know what tomorrow is going to bring, you discover very quickly what you actually believe. Again and again I was reminded that worldly approval is temporary, worldly institutions are temporary, businesses are temporary, and ultimately my identity cannot rest in Gab, in what journalists say about me, in how much money we make, or even in whether the company succeeds. My identity has to be rooted in Christ.

Looking back now, I can see God’s providence throughout so much of what happened, including in things that felt catastrophic at the time. Doors closing forced us to become independent. Being rejected by institutions forced us to stop seeking their approval. The pressure forced me to examine what I actually believed and why I was willing to fight for it. The hardships made me a better builder, a better leader, and, more importantly, pushed me to become more serious about being a Christian husband and father. I would never pretend that I handled every moment perfectly, because I didn’t, but I can say with certainty that I would not have made it through this decade without Christ.

V

That is also why the mission today is about more than simply building successful technology companies. Technology shapes culture, culture shapes people, and increasingly artificial intelligence will participate directly in shaping how people understand truth, morality, history, faith, family, and themselves. If we believe Christ is King, then Christians cannot voluntarily abandon one of the most consequential technologies of our lifetime and simply hope that people who reject our worldview will build it in ways that are healthy for our children and grandchildren. We have a responsibility to build, to create, to compete, and to bring our values into these new systems rather than retreating from them.