A Republican politician from North Carolina is an investor in Gab, the alt-right and often racist social media network used by the Pittsburgh synagogue gunman.

According to the Daily Mail, Dan Bishop, a state senator in North Carolina who is up for re-election next week, boasted in August 2017 that he had backed the site because he was “about done with San Francisco thought police tech giants.”

Bishop is one of the only known investors in the tech startup, which had billed itself as “a free speech platform” for anyone who wanted to join.

It used anonymous crowd-sourcing techniques to raise investment cash and is based in Austin, Texas.

Gab’s most recent appeal for cash suggested a valuation of $10.9 million, but it is unclear whether it has yet become profitable.

But the site has become infamous as a haven for alt-right discourse and conspiracy theories, as well as being used by gunman Robert Bowers, to spread vile anti-Semitic slurs.

Although its founder has insisted it is not a platform for racists, Bowers, of Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, was able to include the words: “jews [sic] are the children of Satan” in his Gab profile bio.

And on Saturday morning, shortly before his bloody rampage began, where he killed 11 people and injured several more, he posted: “Screw your optics – I’m going in.”

Hours after Bowers murdered 11 people, Gab boasted of getting “1 million hits an hour” on its website.

Gab eventually posted a statement on its Medium page saying it “unequivocally disavows and condemns all acts of terrorism and violence.”

Other alt-right users include former Breitbart columnist Milo Yiannopoulos and controversial Info Wars founder Alex Jones.

Gab has nearly 800,000 users, and is similar to Twitter in how it works, but it has been used mostly for trolls and alt-righters who think their hate speech will be censored on other platforms.

Memes are often anti-semitic or some riff on alt-right icons such as Pepe the Frog.

Andrew Torba, 27, the entrepreneur behind Gab has repeatedly claimed it was set up to provide a censorship-free platform, but a recent academic study has shown much of the discourse on the site is classified as hate speech.

In ‘What is Gab? A Bastion of Free Speech or an Alt-Right Echo Chamber?’, researchers from Princeton and University College London, among others, found that the use of hate words was 2.4 times higher on Gab than on Twitter.

After analyzing 22 million posts by 336,000 users, it found that users tended to be more interested than average in topics such as white nationalism.

Torba himself has been controversial, last year writing on a Facebook post: “All of you: f*** off. Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling bulls*** and shove it. I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a President into office, cucks.”

Cucks – a short form for cuckold – has become an increasingly popular insult among the alt-right.

Gab is currently offline, although the site said on today it would be back up by this weekend.