"Free Speech" is not a viable business model for any kind of social media website, or any web 2.0 style site with a large degree of user-generated content. "Free Speech", as in being able to say whatever you want, includes things like child porn, death threats, spam, criminal activity, malware links, basically things that will bring a site to its knees without active content control or moderation. This isn't even a moral/ethical argument, if you're trying to run a viable social media platform, 99.99% of your users log on and if they see their feeds full of that shit they'll just leave, or the content will actively break the website on a technical level.
Promoting Gab as an absolute fundamentalist "Free Speech" platform was incredibly dumb and doomed it from the start, precisely because Torba found himself having to take action against some content that even he found disagreeable, which made him look like a hypocrite to the site's userbase. There is a difference between "Free Speech" and "Free Expression of Opinion", and it's the latter that is worth protecting, not the former.
Let's be clear here, Torba is an idiot and his model was self-contradictory and unsustainable. But to see the site chased off the internet like this is worrying, because it really does seem that free expression on the internet is under threat from companies who are more concerned with negative PR from association with today's target of Two Minute Hate than they are about facilitating the free exchange of ideas. Just because Gab never was the solution to this problem doesn't mean there isn't a problem that needs solving.
