Andrew Torba

Gab, which was started in 2016 by a conservative programmer, Andrew Torba, who was fed up with what he saw as Silicon Valley’s left-wing censorship. The platform’s intentionally slim rule book attracted a crowd of extremists, including white nationalists and neo-Nazis, who had been banned from other social platforms. Milo Yiannopoulos, the former Breitbart writer whose harassment campaigns got him kicked off Twitter, signed up for an account. So did Andrew Anglin, the founder of the neo-Nazi publication Daily Stormer, and Richard Spencer, the well-known white nationalist. Torba grew up in the faded coal country of northeastern Pennsylvania, where his father worked as a FedEx courier, according to his LinkedIn page, and said he dreamed of being an entrepreneur since eighth grade. As a philosophy student at the University of Scranton, he wrote for the college paper, criticized President Barack Obama. Silicon Valley called to Torba. With a friend, he started a technology company called Kuhcoon that helped customers run ad campaigns on Facebook. And when the founders won a competition to join the prestigious Y Combinator boot camp for start-ups, Torba was ecstatic at the prospect of gaining access to more than $100,000 in capital and an elite network of entrepreneurs and investors. On a “shoestring budget,” Torba and a very small team launched Gab that August, said Utsav Sanduja, Gab’s chief operating officer from October 2016 to June 2018. There are now about 800,000 users, said Sanduja, compared with 10,000 two years ago. The company’s few employees are all under 30 and number fewer than half a dozen, including Torba and his wife