“The way we see it is, it’s not about fake news or not fake news,” Utsav Sanduja, the company’s chief communications officer, said in an interview Thursday. “It is up to the user to know what is right and wrong.”

Gab’s guiding philosophy is not to comment at all on whether a user’s post is accurate or not.

“We don’t see human beings as sheep. We trust them,” said Sanduja. “We trust their ability to understand things. They can discern reality from distortion.”

But the shooting at a Washington restaurant earlier this week has raised questions about whether some online denizens actually can distinguish fact from fiction. The assailant told The New York Times that he learned about a conspiracy involving Clinton and a child sex ring from online articles, before driving 350 miles to give a “closer look.”

On Thursday, Clinton decried what she called an “epidemic” of unsubstantiated claims posing as news articles, like the so-called Pizzagate stories.

“The epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda that flooded social media over the past year,” the former Democratic nominee said, means “it’s now clear that so-called fake news can have real-world consequences. It’s a danger that must be addressed and addressed quickly. It’s imperative that leaders in both the private sector and the public sector step up to protect both our democracy and innocent lives.”

Her vice presidential running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, also told CNN on Thursday that “Gen. Flynn’s trafficking in conspiracy stories that a fourth-grader would find incredible suggests either that he’s highly gullible or that he’s so consumed with malice that he loses his ability to judge what’s fact and what’s fiction.”

But for Andrew Torba, the CEO of Gab, removing such content would amount to the type of censorship he says other social media websites are engaging in — and what drove him to launch the site, which is based in Northern California, in the first place.

“As a Christian, as a conservative, as a Republican, these are things that I kept to myself for fear of being blacklisted and obviously for being a minority political opinion, religious opinion, in Silicon Valley,” he told POLITICO. “So [that’s] what I saw happening as I was working. There was a very clear, progressive-driven agenda, very clear progressive workforce, at the executive level, from the top on down.”

Like Twitter, Gab posts have a character limit and like Reddit it allows its users to vote up or down content, giving users a choice not to see certain content.

The site’s popularity is growing. “It’s really exploded since the election,” Torba said. “We are now up to, I believe it’s around 130,000 full accounts.”

In fact, the demand to join is so high they can’t yet meet it. “We are still in beta, that is why we have a wait list,” Torba said. “The demand we are seeing is incredible.”

Torba, like Sanduja, takes issue with any sort of filtering of views. He accuses social media websites like Twitter and Facebook of removing content deemed as “hate speech” or “harassment” without clearly defining what is covered under those terms.

“This enforcement is strictly targeting conservatives, strictly targeting conservative thought leaders,” Torba said. “Some folks are being completely blacklisted from other networks.”

He added: “Facebook admitted to suppressing news from the news feed. Reddit admitted [to] suppressing news from the news feed.”

Gab is designed to welcome all views, Torba says. He describes it as an “alternative that is grounded in free speech and expression, defending that, and using the Constitution, the First Amendment, and rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court to guide what we allow on our site.”

And the platform’s users are diverse, he added.

But he acknowledges the site is increasingly attractive for the so-called alt-right, which is an offshoot of conservatism that mixes racism, anti-semitism, white nationalism and populism.

“For us, Gab isn’t about left or right but rather it’s about the establishment versus the people and grass roots,” he said. “So what we are seeing is, we are obviously attracting a lot of people from the right around the world, because those people are being targeted, they’re being suppressed, they are being censored. So we are attracting them just by nature of them not having anywhere else to go.”

The site is is described by pro-Trump users on Reddit as a “new alternative to [Twitter] without [Social Justice Warrior] censorship.”

“With regard to our conservative base, when people are being systematically dehumanized and labeled an alphabet soup of phobias they are going to look for a different place where they can be themselves and they can speak freely without censorship,” Torba added.

While the site has vowed not to remove any content, Gab does have usage guidelines. They have a zero-tolerance policy for illegal pornography and threats of violence or terrorism. Users are also not allowed to post the private information about others.

However, no user has ever been banned. “We’ve actually never banned a single person,” Sanduja said. “We’ve never banned anyone whatsoever.”

The closest Gab has come to intervening was convincing a white supremacist user nicknamed “weev” to change his profile referencing the rape and murder of Jews.

“In the incident of weev, there was an understanding made that [the] bio had to be altered because it violated our community guidelines,” Sanduja said.

Otherwise, so-called Gabbers are encouraged to “try to be nice and kind to one another.”

The site’s operators see their growing community as taking on the media power structure.

“We like to call it the establishment,” Torba said. “It is our goal to expose the corruption, the collusion and the monopoly that these four or five companies in Silicon Valley have over our digital communication.”

But it also means taking on the traditional media. Shortly after the interview with POLITICO, Torba posted on Medium the 35-minute session, with an introduction warning the “mainstream media” that “your reign of error is over.”