  Social media has become an important venue for diverse groups to share
information, discuss political issues, and organize social movements. Recent
scholarship has shown that the social media ecosystem can affect political
thinking and expression. Individuals and groups across the political spectrum
have engaged in the use of these platforms extensively, even creating their own
forums with varying approaches to content moderation in pursuit of freer
standards of speech. The Gab social media platform arose in this context. Gab
is a social media platform for the so-called alt right, and much of the popular
press has opined about the thematic content of discourses on Gab and platforms
like it, but little research has examined the content itself. Using a publicly
available dataset of all Gab posts from August 2016 until July 2019, the
current paper explores a five percent random sample of this dataset to explore
thematic content on the platform. We run multiple structural topic models,
using standard procedures to arrive at an optimal k number of topics. The final
model specifies 85 topics for 403,469 documents. We include as prevalence
variables whether the source account has been flagged as a bot and the number
of followers for the source account. Results suggest the most nodal topics in
the dataset pertain to the authenticity of the Holocaust, the meaning of red
pill, and the journalistic merit of mainstream media. We conclude by discussing
the implications of our findings for work in ethical content moderation, online
community development, political polarization, and avenues for future research.
