Attendees visit booths at the RePlatform conference in Las Vegas in March. The conference crowd was a hybrid of anti-vaccine activists, supporters of former President Donald Trump and Christian conservatives.
Conveniently for everyone involved, Eddy is the chief operating officer of an alternative payment processor, GabPay. It’s a third-party company that works with the social media platform “Leave Amazon, leave GoDaddy, leave all these woke corporations behind and start spending money with organizations that have your best interests in mind,” said Megan Greene of Patmos, a web-hosting company named after the Greek island that the Christian apostle John is said to have been exiled to.
“But there is social capital to be gained by a lot of these people who are claiming that they have their accounts closed,” she added. She said waves of debanking and deplatforming have followed violent episodes like the deadly Unite the Right white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 and a number of mass shootings explicitly motivated by hate. Another big wave came after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Squire said that for years, she has watched some far-right extremists experiment with building infrastructure to get around these bans.
Asked for comment, Torba responded, “Christ is King” to NPR in a post on X. The phrase is a common, uncontroversial. Torba says he uses it as a regular signoff on his emails after learning that his doing so offended Jonathan Greenblatt at the Anti-Defamation League.