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.”
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
This is such a complicated feeling… On one hand, I agree. But on the other, we can’t specifically pinpoint what censorship is valid and what isn’t.
Edit: Obviously, I’m not considering Nazis in this thought experiment.
Edit 2: OH MY GOD PEOPLE! OF FUCKING COURSE WE SHOULD KEEP NAZIS OUT FFS! 😑
It is only censorship when it is the government, else it is normal people not wanting to deal with Nazis.
If you really want your white supremacists views out there just roll your own setup
It is only censorship when it is the government, else it is normal people not wanting to deal with Nazis.
Makes sense.
If you really want your white supremacists views out there just roll your own setup
sighs I’m not even gonna try to address it now.
Hey sorry Nazis are bad at figuring out how internet works
But on the other, we can’t specifically pinpoint what censorship is valid and what isn’t.
Yes we can. Kicking Nazis off their platform is valid censorship. Nazis lost the right to have a seat at the table in 1945.
Obviously. I’m not considering Nazis in this thought experiment.
It’s indeed very difficult if not impossible to exactly and specifically pinpoint where the line is, it is however extremely easy to see when ideologies and behavior steps across it.
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.
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.
If you ever see it go ahead and screenshot it then email it them while CC some local news source. Hey, how do you feeling your roofing business being affiliated with this?
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! 🥳
deleted by creator
What a stupid argument. Imagine replacing “nazis” with “pedophiles” in her answer
Not that yours is so much better. Imagine replacing “nazis” with “pro-choice”, still sure the platform should remove the contents ?
Your analogy is false but yes if you are pro-forced birth you should not profit from pro-choice groups. Personal integrity is important and while I very much don’t agree with the forced birth crowd I am willing to pretend that some of them are sincere.
Your analogy is false
And why ? Just because I pointed out a scenario that do not imply a clearly illegal situation like yours ?
but yes if you are pro-forced birth you should not profit from pro-choice groups. Personal integrity is important and while I very much don’t agree with the forced birth crowd I am willing to pretend that some of them are sincere.
You are right from a a personal perspective, I as a person must have personal integrity.
But a platform ? Should not be the duty of a platform to carry both points of view and let the reader to decide what is wrong or what is good ?Should a newspaper not talk about something because some readers don’t agree with it ? Because that is what you are saying: what I think is true and good while what they think is wrong and bad, and so they need to be removed.
If someone says it is raining outside, the newspaper’s job is to actually check whether it is raining outside NOT to say it both is and is not raining and let their “readers decide.”
Should a newspaper not talk about something because some readers don’t agree with it ?
You are arguing that newspapers should discuss NAZI ideals as if they are as valid as any other. No one decent agrees with you.
You are arguing that newspapers should discuss NAZI ideals as if they are as valid as any other. No one decent agrees with you.
Nope, I am arguing that if something is not illegal it is not up to the platform to censor it.
If that 200 authors asked a judge to command substack to remove the post, then good.
If you decide that today is good that a platform censor something, (and I agree that nazis are not that nice thing to even consider to discuss) then tomorrow you cannot protest that a platform remove something that you consider good.
Like Meta removing all the pro palestinian post/propaganda: is it acceptable that it is Meta to decide that even if it is not illegal?
Free speech is absolute, and it include even what we hate.
Free speech IS NOT freedom from social consequences. And one of those social consequences is that people are allowed to tell you to take a hike.
And I agree. But it seems that you still don’t understand how dangerous is to go after the platform instead of the authors of the messages.
But let’s suppose that it is correct to go after the platform, so this time the offending content is removed. Fine, good thing.
Next month 174 authors ask to remove everything about the right to have an abortion because they are offended by it and they think that it is wrong (and in some place it is even illegal), what do you think should happen?
A lot of the time people have this conversation from the perspective of the person who has no horse in the race. They aren’t a Nazi, nor are a target of Nazis. It ignores the people who are effected.
Imagine you are in a space and someone posts a death threat targeting you. Others rally around that as any censorship is bad censorship. Every time you use that space you get a reminder of how someone particularly wants you dead. Now imagine that becomes just a regular part of your day. Over and over and over again you are exposed to people smugly calling you less than human, a threat to society, a moraless degenerate. You get this nice cold shock whenever you see it and get to remember how vulnerable you are, how gleeful these calls to take your rights away for something you never opted into and can’t opt out of… And you are expected to take whatever anxiety is sown in you as just normal. That burden of people gleefully discussing your death just gets to be a part of your everyday. To others looking at you dealing with that burden it is treated as tolerable level of permanent unhappiness. It’s simply not supposed to be other people’s problem. You may not ask for assistance with managing those burdens because the cost of societies “tolerance” for speech has decided that you must personally pay for everyone’s unrestricted discourse.
Then there’s the other half. Say I create a platform. Maybe I am running a print shop. I maintain it, run it, and think that I am doing society a service for facilitating a means to communicate. I find out someone has been printing death threats at my shop. Maybe they are even death threats towards someone I know. How would I feel knowing someone is taking the resources I manage, using the infrastructure I maintain to specifically terrorize someone? This person printing these death threats made ME complicit in spreading their death threat so that someone in the above example gets to feel unsafe as they go about their day. In fact, spreading death threats is a crime. Should I not be allowed to refuse to take their business?
We as a society have the ability to differentiate between death threats and other political discourse. Calling for a genocide of a group of people - is a death threat. It may not be directed at a singular person but lemme tell you when you are the target it feels like it might as well be calling on you by name. There is no moderation policy, even an unrestricted one, that is truly ethically neutral. Your choices about what is or isn’t allowed on your watch always effects people and the mental cost is borne by someone.
Very smart post, highly.
If it is illegal then I am sure that a judge should not have any problem to order substack to remove the posts.
You are making a case where there is somenthing illegal going on, if the law do not protect you, it is the law that is wrong, not someone doing something lawful (but morally wrong for other people)
Law is a funny beast. Lots of people do things which are illegal all the time and get away with it because you basically have to assert your right to be protected by law to sort of activate it. Like someone yelling at me that they are going to kill me while I am out in public is technically a form of assult. , I can call the authorities and get them to assist me to make sure they don’t follow through and to get them to stay the hell away from me but chances are I am not going to seek restitution in court for something that small because I would have to press charges, seek and pay for legal council, everything would need to be processed to make sure the law is being properly handled at all points of the arrest and the punishment would likely be fairly trifling for all my troubles.
Private entities already basically have the imperitive to determine what is permissible on their platforms. Freedom of speech is not practiced under the auspices of substack. They are allowed to kick you out for whatever the heck they want (some exceptions applying) because they own that space. To remove posts as threats a judge would have to go through each individual one, source it, bring the original commenter into court and go through due process with every single user to check it against their local jurisdiction’s laws for threats and the likely outcome would just be small fines and community service… Quite frankly the juice would not be worth the squeeze.
On the other hand we are absolutely allowed to have an opinion that substack letting Nazis spread hate speech on their platform under their watch is a moral failure on their part.
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.
Link to story?
noticed that the story is now being summarized in dictionaries, haha
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).
Another day of thanking
godthe devs for the decentralized Fediverse and Lemmy 🙏😔You and me both. Fuck Substack and fuck Nazis.
They are right but it could hurt their bottom line if the non-nazis leave
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.
“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
― Elie Wiesel
Nazism doesn’t deserve tolerance, any person who doesn’t punch it in the face is equal or worse.
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.
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?
I actually prefer this type of hands-off approach. I find it offensive that people would refuse to let me see things because they deem it too “bad” for me to deal with. I find it insulting anyone would stop me reading how to make meth or read Mein Kampf. I’m 40yo and it’s pretty fucking difficult to offend me and to think I’m going to be driven to commit crime just by reading is offensive.
I don’t need protecting from speech/information. I’m perfectly capable and confident in my own views to deal with bullshit of all types.
If you’re incapable of dealing with it - then don’t fucking read it.
Fact is the more you clamp down on stuff like this the more you drive people into the shadows. 4chan and the darkweb become havens of ‘victimhood’ where they can spout their bullshit and create terrorists. When you prohibit information/speech you give it power.
In high school it was common for everyone to hunt for the Anarchists/Jolly Roger Cookbook. I imagine there’s kids now who see it as a challenge to get hold of it and terrorist manuals - not because they want to blow shit up, but because it’s taboo!
Same with drugs - don’t pick and eat that mushroom. Don’t burn that plant. Anyone with 0.1% of curiosity will ask “why?” and do it because they want to know why it’s prohibited.
Porn is another example. The more you lock it down the more people will thirst for it.
Open it all up to the bright light of day. Show it up for all it’s naked stupidity.
Agreed. I actually had come back to this topic specifically to make this exact point, which for all the time I’d spent on this at this point I feel like I hadn’t said.
People are adults, generally speaking. It’s weird to say that you can’t have a newsletter that has a literal swastika on it, because people will be able to read it but unable to realize that what it’s saying is dangerous violence. Apparently we have to have someone “in charge” of making sure only the good stuff is allowed to be published, and keeping away the bad stuff, so people won’t be influenced by bad stuff. This is a weird viewpoint. It’s one the founding fathers were not at all in agreement with.
Personally, I do think that there’s a place for organized opposition to slick internet propaganda which pulls people down the right-wing rabbit hole, because that’s a huge problem right now. I don’t actually know what that opposition looks like, and I can definitely see a place for banning certain behaviors (bot accounts, funded troll operations, disguising the source of a message) that people might class as “free speech,” or adding counterbalancing “free speech” in kind to misleading messages (Twitter’s “community notes” are actually a pretty good way of combating it for example). But simply knee-jerking that we have to find the people who are wrong, and ban them, because if we let people say wrong stuff then other people will read it and become wrong, is a very childish way to look at people who consume media on the internet.
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.
You probably got banned by reddit because other subreddits will nail you with bots for just posting to certain subs regardless of the context.
No, I saw one of the Nazis I posted talking on Facebook about how he had reported me to Reddit admins. Well then don’t have a swastika face tattoo.
“Yeah they’re nazis but hey, they bring the money in. Why should I ban them?”
