:abunhdhappyhop: :abunhdhappy: :abunhdhop: :abunhd: :abunhdhappyhop: :abunhdhappy:those in the know who study various forms of network psychology, including cults, like me, have most certainly heard about the ABCDEF. if you didn’t know, it’s a framework for evaluating cults, specifically for determining how dangerous they are.
out of curiosity, lets see how Gab scores on this. it’s a bunch of metrics, 0 through 10, which get totalled up for a final score.
okay. here goes. note, these are subjective assessments based on my own personal observations of their behaviour.
internal control: 10 (they ban anyone who challenges their narrative)
external control: 5 (they don’t try to influence outsiders, but try to spin any attacks against their narrative, so i think 5 is fair)
knowledge claimed by leadership: 8 (turbo and friends seem reviled and mostly faultless by their followers)
knowledge credited to leadership: 8 (for the same reason)
dogma: 10 (us vs world mentality strongly present)
recruiting: 10 (duh)
front groups: 10 (they are trying to use the fediverse ecosystem as cover for their activities)
acquisition of wealth: 10 (GAB tokens lol)
sexual manipulation: 0 (haven’t seen any ERP)
sexual favoritism: 0 (again, it’s an online community, haven’t seen any ERP from these guys and to be clear, i don’t want to)
censorship: 10 (they ban people who challenge their views)
isolation: 5 (if you are banned, you can’t interact anymore, but you can make a new account)
dropout control: 0 (but this could be higher, i don’t know)
violence: 10 (CTO writes violent fan fiction)
paranoia: 10 (us vs world mentality again)
grimness: 10 (any negative feedback reinforces us vs. world)
surrender of will: 0 (you can leave gab at any time)
hypocrisy: 10 (basically torba’s entire life story to this point)
final score: 126
needless to say 126 is an extremely high score for this sort of diagnostic tool…
All Jonkman Microblog content and data are available under the