Substack says it will not remove or demonetize Nazi content

I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either

Actions speak louder than words. Fuck Substack and fuck any platform that offers a safe haven for nazis.

If there are 10 nazis at a table and you decide to sit among them, there are 11 nazis sitting at that table.

Freedom of speech doesn't mean that you are obligated to host a platform so shitty people can use it to share shitty ideals. It simply means that you won't get arrested on a federal level.

Websites can do whatever they want, including deciding that they don't want to be a platform for hate speech. If people are seeking a place for this conversation genre to happen, and they want it enough, they can run their own website.

Imagine if you invited a friend of a friend over, and they were sharing nasty ideals at your Christmas party. And they brought their friends. Are you just going to sit there and let them turn your dinner into a political rally? No, you're going to kick them out. It's your dinner, like it is your website. If you don't kick them out, then at some level, you're aligning with them.

Yea... Meta took the same "free peaches" approach and the entire fucking globe is now dealing with various versions of white nationalism. So like, can we actually give censorship of hate a fucking try for once? I'm willing to go down that road.

To be clear — what McKenzie is saying here is that Substack will continue to pay Nazis to write Nazi essays. Not just that they will host Nazi essays (at Substack's cost), but they will pay for them.

They are, in effect, hiring Nazis to compose Nazi essays.

“we don’t like or condone bigotry in any form.” I mean they are litterally Condoning bigotry.

"His response similarly doesn’t engage other questions from the Substackers Against Nazis authors, like why these policies allow it to moderate spam and newsletters from sex workers but not Nazis."

Doesn't seem very consistent.

So substack is a pro-nazi platform run by Nazi enablers, got it.

This would be silly even if they didn’t moderate at all but they do. They don’t allow sex workers use their service. And we aren’t talking about “Nazis” as a code word for the far right. The complaint letter cited literal Nazis with swastika logos.

Plus, how grand are his delusions of grandeur if he thinks his fucking glorified email blast manager is the one true hope for free speech? Let the Nazis self-host an open source solution (like Ghost).

Nazism doesn't deserve tolerance, any person who doesn't punch it in the face is equal or worse.

So they are a Nazi platform. End of.

So they're Nazis

"Let's tolerate the people that say they want to genocide entire ethnic groups" Surely nothing bad is gonna happen /s

So let me get this straight... They don't like Nazis, but Nazis not making money is worse than Nazis making money?

Goodbye substack.

Being a Nazi isn't a "view." It is a political movement guided by the principles of hate, violence, and genocide.

Tolerating Naziism and allowing it to use social tools to spread its hate is what makes it worse.

We already knew that SS liked Nazis.

All joking aside, silencing Nazis and deplatforming them is LITERALLY fighting against them. How is allowing them to make money and market themselves on your platform doing anything to stem the tide of Nazism? Obviously they're playing culture war games and saying they're not.

McKenzie followed up later with a similar statement to the one today, saying “we don’t like or condone bigotry in any form.

Condone:

verb accept and allow (behavior that is considered morally wrong or offensive) to continue

"We don't like or condone bigotry in any form."

...But we are happy to financially support bigotry and directly profit from it.

Facebook just shrugs off the rampant white supremacist content on its platform with great success, you can literally put up a profile photo with an "It's OK to be white" frame, or "white power" supplied by Facebook. I guess Substack thinks that if it works for Facebook it should be fine for them.

Incidentally Reddit banned me for posting pictures of Nazis on r/beholdthemasterrace, a subreddit for mocking white supremacy, when some Nazis went and complained to Reddit admins I was doing it. Reddit also sides with Nazis, they're just quieter about it.

Okay fine, I'm never clicking on a substack link again.

And after say a grace period of about 6 months to move elsewhere, I'm going to assume anyone associating with the service is at best a nazi sympathiser

Go ahead, be a Nazi bar, I'm sure their money is worth it

Is substack used in the EU? They might want to rethink their stance then...

What does Substack plan to do with the profits that it makes from hosting Nazi content?

On one hand, Substack is in it's rights and as a journalistic organization, they are in the right.

The issue is: Once you serve a Nazi in your bar, you become a Nazi bar. This is no longer a marginalized viewpoint you can ignore. Its actively recruiting and frightening. Inaction is enabling. Substack is going to become shitty, and fast. They will lose high engagement users, first when the ones who protested pile out for another platform and then quickly when the quality dips.

Also, their cavalier attitude will change when Stripe steps in.

this is enablement

So they have no rules, any content is acceptable?

Anything less is "censorship" after all

No, it does not “make it worse”.

In fact, stamping out dissent and controlling people is incredibly effective. Ask any dictator.

Control is effective and necessary when it comes to people actively trying to damage society. No, I’m not supporting dictatorship or authoritarianism, just pointing out that control is effective.

Being a sect of destructive assholes doesn’t mean you should get a platform.

Mckenzie needs to read that Reddit story about the bartender who kicked out a guy with the Third Reich eagle ensign on his shirt despite him quietly minding his own business. I really don't want Substack to "suddenly become a Nazi bar." I'm just a reader, but if I ever start a newsletter I may reconsider my platform. I am on a basic free plan for all Substack channels I read. I've thought about upgrading my subscription to some, but now I will hesitate.

Money is the only vote that matters. Avoid the Nazi bar. Don't give them ad revenue or search engine relevance (for what that's worth anymore).

Free speech POV aside, Substack is running a business as a publisher of content. They sell advertising space. You know what de values your advertising space? Unsafe hateful content. Advertisers care about "brand safety" in terms of what their ads appear next to. You can't run a good advertising sales business if the advertisers don't have guarantees on brand safety.

What a stupid argument. Imagine replacing "nazis" with "pedophiles" in her answer

Another day of thanking god the devs for the decentralized Fediverse and Lemmy 🙏😔

This is plainly irresponsible.

Gen Z needs to understand the historical lesson that the Blues Brothers taught those before them. Illinois Nazis exist, and some days they demonstrate, as per their right to freedom of speech - but this is as much as an opportunity to humiliate them and openly critique the mindset as anyone else. Dark little underground communities flourish behind closed doors.

Here's a Wired article featuring four good alternatives to Substack.

TIL that Substack is apparently a bunch of crypto-fascists who expect people to believe they don't support Nazis, they just give them money and a place at their table to talk about it.

And then people wonder why we're so scared of Facebook if the fediverse is "supposed to be open".

The answer is literally in front of you, people!

This tracks with my previous attempts at reporting that Sinfest guy. Posts hundreds of comics that blatantly break multiple official substack content guidelines and I get the effective equivalent of a promise for "action" combined with a dismissive eye roll. They completely ignored my follow-up email detailing the complete lack of action and the dozen or so new content guideline violations.

Translated: McKenzie just wants the sweet money and is trying to gaslight us into thinking platforming nazis is ok.

“Yeah they’re nazis but hey, they bring the money in. Why should I ban them?”

Jesus Christ censorship has become such a meaningless word now.

we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.

Happy Opposite Day, everyone! 🥳

I see literalnazis.com is available for cheap if anybody want to 302 that to substack.

Only thing I can recommend is finding their advertisers and letting them know what they're advertising on

If a Nazi has a large subscription following than Substack would be directly profiting from Nazi content.

I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views.

"But we'll gladly host those views on our platform, run ads alongside them, and profit from them."

Cool... so they now facilitate and directly benefit from Nazi activity. Sounds great when you put it like that.

For anyone who remembers the interview the CEO did with the Verge back when they launched Notes, this isn't surprising at all.

You can see a transcript here. The relevant section can be found by searching all brown people are animals or more specifically just animals and reading on from there.

I'm not sure if the video footage of the interview is still available, but it's even worse because you can see that the CEO is completely lost when talking about the idea of moderating anything and basically shuts down because they have nothing to say all while the interview is politely berating them about how they're obviously failing a litmus test.

Do note that above the point where "animals" occurs is some post-hoc context provided by the interviewer (perhaps why the video is no longer easily available?) where they point out that the question they asked and the response they got wasn't exactly as extreme as it first appeared. But they also point out that it's still very notable despite the slightly mitigating correction and I'd agree entirely, especially if you watch(ed) the video and clocked the CEO's demeanor and lack of any intelligent thought on the issue.

I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views. But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.

Are Musky and Hamish McKenzie’s friends because that sound like the same bullshit he would say. Also, hasn't deplatforming actually been shown to work?

Have fun watching your website devolve into 4chan levels of degeneracy.

This is the first time I heard of the platform and I intend to keep it that way

I want them to explain how it makes things worse.

Submitted for good faith discussion: Substack shouldn’t decide what we read. The reason it caught my attention is that it's co-signed by Edward Snowden and Richard Dawkins, who evidently both have blogs there I never knew about.

I'm not sure how many of the people who decide to comment on these stories actually read up about them first, but I did, such as by actually reading the Atlantic article linked. I would personally feel very uncomfortable about voluntarily sharing a space with someone who unironically writes a post called "Vaccines Are Jew Witchcraftery". However, the Atlantic article also notes:

Experts on extremist communication, such Whitney Phillips, the University of Oregon journalism professor, caution that simply banning hate groups from a platform—even if sometimes necessary from a business standpoint—can end up redounding to the extremists’ benefit by making them seem like victims of an overweening censorship regime. “It feeds into this narrative of liberal censorship of conservatives,” Phillips told me, “even if the views in question are really extreme.”

Structurally this is where a comment would usually have a conclusion to reinforce a position, but I don't personally know what I support doing here.

Now I'm curious if anybody adds something about LGBTQ on there, if that's promptly removed.

Money talks

This reminds me of this comic:

They are right but it could hurt their bottom line if the non-nazis leave

Ehhh, it's one of those things where I agree with the principle, but the principle fails. It's the so called tolerance paradox (which isn't actually a paradox at all, but that's tangential).

On principle, no company should be in the business of deciding what is and isn't acceptable "speech". That's simply not something we really want happening.

But then there's nazis and other outright insane bigots. But we still don't really want companies making that call, because they'll decide on the side of profit, period. If enough of the nazi types get enough power and money going, every single fucking company out there that isn't owned by a single person, or very small group of people that share the same ideals, is going to be deciding that it's the nazi bullshit that's the only acceptable speech.

This is something that has to come from the bottom to the top and be decided on a legal level first. We absolutely can ban nazi type bullshit if we want to. There's plenty of room for it to be pointed at as the incitement to violence that it is. There need to be very specific, very limited definitions to govern what is and isn't part of that

And the limitations have to be impossible to expand without starting all the way over with the kind of stringency it takes to amend the constitution.

That takes it out of the hands of corporations, and makes it very difficult to game. But it has to come from us, as a people first.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

While McKenzie offers no evidence to back these ideas, this tracks with the company’s previous stance on taking a hands-off approach to moderation.

In April, Substack CEO Chris Best appeared on the Decoder podcast and refused to answer moderation questions.

“We’re not going to get into specific ‘would you or won’t you’ content moderation questions” over the issue of overt racism being published on the platform, Best said.

In a 2020 letter from Substack leaders, including Best and McKenzie, the company wrote, “We just disagree with those who would seek to tightly constrain the bounds of acceptable discourse.”

The Atlantic also pointed out an episode of McKenzie’s podcast with a guest, Richard Hanania, who has published racist views under a pseudonym.

McKenzie does, however, cite another Substack author who describes its approach to extremism as one that is “working the best.” What it’s being compared to, or by what measure, is left up to the reader’s interpretation.

The original article contains 365 words, the summary contains 157 words. Saved 57%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Techbros tolerate Nazis.

You can run your own blog with WordPress. It even Federates.

(transcribed from a series of tweets) - iamragesparkle

I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, "no. get out." And the dude next to me says, "hey i'm not doing anything, i'm a paying customer." and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, "out. now." and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed

Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, "you didn't see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them."

And i was like, ohok and he continues. "you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it's always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don't want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too. And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it's too late because they're entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.

And i was like, 'oh damn.' and he said "yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people."

And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven't forgotten that at all.