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.
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 ?
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?
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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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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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?
Have fun watching your website devolve into 4chan levels of degeneracy.
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.
“We don’t like or condone bigotry in any form.”
…But we are happy to financially support bigotry and directly profit from it.
That’s why having a bill of rights is such a dangerous thing.
Other countries have laws that allow for people to speak freely, but having “free speech” enshrined as a right, means you allow companies like this to promote hate speech but dust their hands off and claim, “We’re just following the constitution” so they can profit from open racism and look clean while doing it.
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Really? Quote the lines where I said that, Straw Man. You should work at a movie theatre; you’re a world class projector.
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And yet you still don’t understand it! Need to work on that reading comprehension, fella.
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.)
“Yeah they’re nazis but hey, they bring the money in. Why should I ban them?”
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.
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!
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 animalsor more specifically justanimalsand 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.
What does Substack plan to do with the profits that it makes from hosting Nazi content?
Advertise in hopes of luring in more of that sweet sweet nazi fascism money.
I’m just guessing here, but those Swiss bankers are still as fond of hiding nazis’ ill-gotten gains for them as ever…
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.
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.
So they’re Nazis
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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!
