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.”
If there are 10 nazis at a table and you decide to sit among them, there are 11 nazis sitting at that table.
So you think Deeyah Khan is a Nazi?
(I’d encourage anyone to watch White Right: Meeting the Enemy if you haven’t seen it.)
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Out of curiosity, let’s say a man needs a place for sleep, and for get one, he decides to help out a nazi, for example by fixing their long distance radio, would you call this person a nazi,@xkforce@lemmy.world ?
A lot of people died rather than help them so yes I would judge the shit out of someone that helps a nazi knowing full well what they are.
The person I mention in my previous post, is this man. As he was along the french riviera, looking for intels, he ended in this situation, that there was no vacancy in hotels, and he finally got a hotel room, by fixing the long distance radio. How do you judge the shit out of him, by curiosity ?
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Nazis don’t deserve help. They fundamentally are antisocial in their ideology. By helping them, you aid a Nazi. Why would you willingly help a Nazi?
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Do not tolerate the intolerant.
Toleration is a social contract. Those that break the contract should not be allowed to seek protection under it.
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.
I like your example there a lot, I’m going to use that in the future when I’m trying to express that notion. In the past I’ve never been able to articulate that exact concept. So thanks!
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).
They don’t allow sex workers use their service.
What about a nazi sex worker ?
Do they not allow sex workers to use their service? Here’s a sex worker who posts on Substack.
I believe keeping the ability for sex workers to post there intact is a good reason not to ban Nazis – basically, deciding who are “good” posters and allowing only them leads to a steadily-expanding list of “bad” categories of people who need to get banned, with sex workers as an obvious additional early target.
If you’re open to reading an article from Reason.com expanding on this take, which I partially agree with, there it is.
(Edit: Restructured so that more of the argument comes directly from me, as opposed to Reason.com)
They don’t allow sexually explicit content. From their TOS:
We don’t allow porn or sexually exploitative content on Substack, including any depictions of sexual acts for the sole purpose of sexual gratification.
So, a porn star could write about the industry but couldn’t use it like “OnlyFans but blog” where she had a post and included some pictures for subscribers.
Which is fine. They’re the publisher. They can decide smut is a step too far. But don’t pretend to be some free speech martyr for publishing Nazi propaganda while banning showing a tit.
… which is very different from “not allowing sex workers to use their service,” and undermines the whole argument that “well they do do moderation, they just think Nazis are on the ‘ok’ list.” I would have had a totally different response if the person I was responding to had tried to argue that since they don’t allow actual porn, they should also be obligated to ban extreme viewpoints.
I’m not at all surprised that a Koch-funded publication thinks that Substack should allow Nazis to use their platform to make money.
Ad hominem. Nice. That said, I get it if you think Reason.com is a sketchy source to try to point to as an argument for anything. I restructured my message, so I’m simply stating my facts and opinions directly, so you can disagree directly if you like, instead of just jeering at the “Reason.com” part of it.
If the fact that I cited “Reason.com” as an aside is a problem, but it’s not a problem the person I was replying to was calmly stating something that was highly relevant to the argument that wasn’t actually true… you might be only concerned with whether something agrees with your biases, not whether it’s accurate. Does that not seem like a problem to you?
The Kochs are Nazis. That’s not an ad hominem, that’s just a fact.
David, along with his brother Chuck Koch continued their father’s rabid anti-communism and anti-semitism by founding and funding both the Reason Foundation and the Cato Institute. Both “think tanks” billed themselves as libertarian. Both published holocaust denial literature including the writings of school mates of the Koch brothers.
They were even partly raised by a Nazi.
Here again, you get this strange recurrence of a kind of little touch of Nazi Germany, because … Charles and Frederick, the oldest sons, were put in the hands of a German nanny who was described by other family members as just a fervid Nazi. She was so devout a supporter of Hitler that finally, after five years working for the family, she left of her own volition in 1940 when Hitler entered France because she wanted to celebrate with the Fuehrer.
And no, it doesn’t seem like a problem to me to call Nazis Nazis. Because they’re Nazis.
“Ad hominem” refers to ignoring the content of a message, and making your argument based on who is speaking. It doesn’t mean that your statement about the speaker isn’t factual, or that understanding more about who is speaking might not be relevant – it simply refers to the idea that you should at some point address the content of the message if you’re going to debate it.
In this case, I said something, you ignored the content and instead focused on the fact that I’d linked to something, and criticized the source of the thing I’d linked to. Okay, fair enough, the Koch brothers are Nazis. I don’t like them either. If you want to respond to the content of my message, I’ve now reframed it so the stuff I’m saying is coming directly from me, so that “but Reason.com!” isn’t any longer a way to dismiss it because of who is speaking.
“Ad hominem” refers to ignoring the content of a message, and making your argument based on who is speaking.
I’m aware. And that is perfectly valid when the content of the message is defending monetizing Nazis is funded by Nazis.
You missed what I’m saying. I’m not funded by Nazis. You took my message and ignored what I was saying in favor of criticizing Reason.com. Fair enough. I was inviting you to continue the conversation, if you have an argument against the content, now that I’ve removed anything that could be construed as “because Reason.com says so” and simply said what I think about it.
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.
Not exactly. Substack subscribers pay subscription fees, the content author keeps roughly 80% of the fees, and the rest goes to Substack or to offset hosting costs. The Nazi subscribers are paying the Nazi publishers, and money is flowing from the Nazi subscribers to Substack because of that operation (not away from Substack as it would be if they hired Nazis).
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How is it pedantic to point out that “will pay for them” means “will get paid by them”?
There’s a perfectly good argument to be made that Substack shouldn’t host Nazis even if they’re making money off them. But that wasn’t (edit:
yourthe) message;yourthe message was, they’re hiring Nazis. It’s relevant whether they’re materially supporting the Nazis, or being materially supported by a cut of their revenue.It wasn’t my message, but it certainly made sense to me and still does. whereas your message makes sense but in a totally different way. It’s basically “nuh-uh”
Hm. Fair enough. The core complaint I have with banning Nazis from being able to speak, has nothing to do with which way the money is flowing. And I fixed “your” to be “the”; I just hadn’t noticed you weren’t the person I was talking with before.
That’s splitting hairs. Salespeople who work on commission are keeping an amount of what they make for the company, but I doubt many people would claim they aren’t being paid to sell a product.
Being a Nazi isn’t a “view.” It is a political movement guided by the principles of hate, violence, and genocide.
And they are saying they are cool with that.
“Let’s tolerate the people that say they want to genocide entire ethnic groups” Surely nothing bad is gonna happen /s
Like 1930s Germany did.
So the US government? Except instead of “tolerate” write “massively support and arm”
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Goodbye substack.
I’d love to say that, but unfortunately journalists I respect, who are doing very excellent content that repudiates fascism, don’t really have anywhere else to go. Radley Balko, for example, is a preeminent journalist on the topics of police brutality, law enforcement misdeeds, and failures of the criminal justice system. But WaPo didn’t want to publish him any more, so where does he go?
I hope they find alternatives, but I’m not going to stop paying for journalism from people like Balko. I don’t want to let white supremacists force any more epistemic closure.
Medium?
No idea how the compensation structure works on Medium. But I also have no idea what their content moderation policies are either.
Almost as if Radley Balko’s publisher deciding whether he was allowed to continue to speak anymore was a bad thing, and giving him a place where he can do it and earn a living and no one polices his content was a good thing.
(Edit: Woo hoo hoo judging by the downvotes y’all sure don’t like it when it happens to one of your guys. Just to be clear, I don’t really care all that much what happens to the literal Nazis. I only care a lot about this issue because I suspect that once you’re done kicking off Nazis, you’ll want to kick off the Joe Rogans and the Dave Chappelles and the COVID denialists and sooner or later some person will arrive with a list on which is someone you like. Like Radley Balko. And yet, somehow, that’ll be totally different in your mind, not connected at all with the earlier people you were advocating for banning.)
So they’re Nazis
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Nazism doesn’t deserve tolerance, any person who doesn’t punch it in the face is equal or worse.
Agreed. Unfortunate that many times this is met with some smug shit about “wanting echo chambers”
Not wanting a feed full of modern phrenology and a 20 page analysis about how this weeks 13 year old black kid getting murdered by the cops for looking at them wrong is “totally fine and actually should happen more” does NOT mean I “want echo chambers”
What about my friend No-Arms Norman? All he can do is kick a Nazi in the ass!
Not true! Norman can also kick the teeth out of those fucking nazi mouths!
But can he kick a nazi so hard in the balls he tore a tendon in his foot?
Fists aren’t a cure to intolerance. Probably doesn’t hurt so knock
yourselfa nazi out. As long as force isn’t being used to prevent open discussion and debate, it would be most unwise to drive dangerous ideologies underground where they can’t be monitored and understood.You should read the tolerance paradox, to understand why you shouldn’t be tolerant to intolerant people.
Why would someone would know myself? you idiot? I am not nazy or plan to tolerate them.
Those ideologies should be put in the mud where they belong, it is good to read history to understand why they are bad, and only stupid untolerant and racists edgelords are the ones that think that being nazi is cool.
Lol, you think you can monitor and understand those? lol. Just look how dangerous racist idiots are, for example the maga, who tried to overturn the election, in an attempt to inssurection, all of those idiots are traitors, and if they want to say that it is not that bad, then they are also as stupid as those inssurectionits.
I like the idea that tolerance is a social contract.
You’re only covered by it when you practice it.
You break the contract by being intolerant, nobody is obligated to be tolerant to you anymore.
That is the paradox of tolerance. And describes how you need to stop being tolerant to groups like the nazis.
Tolerating Naziism and allowing it to use social tools to spread its hate is what makes it worse.
Teach critical thinking skills as a pillar of the school curriculum and the population will be immunized preventing the spread.
And teach the value of everyone being equal and their human rights, in school and at home, where it matters (both).
So they are a Nazi platform. End of.
If you run a bar, and Nazis hang out in your bar, you run a Nazi bar
Almost like some old school bronze age curse. Doomed to forever open bars and family restaurants that within months become Nazi. The bar tender has a PTSD unfocused glaze as he recalls the gradually morphing of his last 11 bars.
If only there was something you could do to the Nazis to stop them showing up at your bar
Not in this version of the curse
But it’s one of their defining features - they talk a big game, but if you hit them with a bat they run away crying like the pissy little cowards they really are
Same thing goes for Zionists.
I mean yeah, but what does that have to do with anything here?
They’re all over this thread defending Substack.
So substack is a pro-nazi platform run by Nazi enablers, got it.
🤦
Bring out the bad-faith arguments, lol.
So let me get this straight… They don’t like Nazis, but Nazis not making money is worse than Nazis making money?
Nazis making money and Substack not getting a cut of it is apparently worse than Nazis making money.
They are taking a free-speech approach, I suppose.
Ah, I see we’re using the SCOTUS definition of ‘free speech’ where money is speech.
It’s 2023 and we have all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips but somehow people still have no idea what free speech is…
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
coded language for “we think Nazis have a point”
