More than 200 Substack authors asked the platform to explain why it’s “platforming and monetizing Nazis,” and now they have an answer straight from co-founder Hamish McKenzie:
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.
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. McKenzie followed up later with a similar statement to the one today, saying “we don’t like or condone bigotry in any form.”
Is substack used in the EU? They might want to rethink their stance then…
Nope, as far as I know only a couple of countries has explict laws againt Nazi (Germany obviously and Italy to some extend).
But in the end it will be the person to be persecuted if any crime is committed, not the medium.
Nobody in Italy think to punish or boycott a company just because the mafia is using and paying the company’s products or services.Nope. Platforms have a responsibility to not host hate-speech and other illegal content, eg. remove it. Failure to do so is prosecutable.
