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.”
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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.
“I want you to know that I don’t like nazis. But I am fine platforming them and profiting from them. Now here is some bullshit about silencing ‘ideas.’”
“I don’t like Nazis… but you have to understand, they’re very profitable.”
Do not tolerate the intolerant.
Toleration is a social contract. Those that break the contract should not be allowed to seek protection under it.
This is such a wonderfully ironic statement. It is through toleration that they are painted in a poor light.
Tolerance is a social contract not a right. If you are tolerant, you earn tolerance for yourself. If you are intolerant, you don’t deserve tolerance yourself. It’s really not that complicated imo. I don’t feel the need to be tolerant of racist, bigoted people.
Tolerance is a social contract not a right. If you are tolerant, you earn tolerance for yourself. If you are intolerant, you don’t deserve tolerance yourself.
I’ve never heard it said that way. This is a fantastic way to put it.
You dont. You just have to be tolerant of their existence because theirr existance is protected by right and law. If you punch a Nazi your still getting charged with assault and battery. If you kill a racist your still going to jail. We dont illegalize views and ideas in america.
No you don’t have to tolerate their existence.
We fought a war against Nazis for a fucking reason.
Their ideals are shut and anyone who pushes them is worth less than the air they breath and the dirt they shit in.
The first amendment says you do in fact have to tolerate them sir. You may not commit acts of violence against them for their speech or you get put in prison. Thats the way it is.
The first amendment applies to the government’s actions. Not personal actions.
Hate speech is not a protected class so you can be refused service for it at any business,
This is ideal, but falls on a simple premise - everyone believes the other party is intolerant and that they are proudly righeous in behaving like a judge, jury and executioner.
Open and free critique means manipulation and grooming happens far less effectively, which neuters anything from its core. Society is the judge, but it must also be the metric it is measured against.
I feel like you’re just being contrarian for its own sake.
The first paragraph is just plain false. Everyone believes others to be intolerant? No, the parent comment just said you be intolerant to the people who prove themselves to be intolerant? “Judge, Jury, Executioner”? Word salad. And people should judge others - we already do that, thats how we know if we can trust someone and expend the energy spend guarding against them in more useful tasks. The second paragraph is just a whole lot of words that say nothing.
Also, I’m just following your advice:
Open and free critique means manipulation and grooming happens far less effectively, which neuters anything from its core.
Be better.
paradox of tolerance
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paradox of tolerance
From the article…
“I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.”
there is nothing worthwhile lost silencing nazi bullshit from social media
there is nothing worthwhile lost silencing nazi bullshit from social media
"… as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.”
If you don’t win the argument, the argument goes on forever.
lol imagine trying to ‘win’ an argument with an idiot instead of just mocking them for the lulz…
lol imagine trying to ‘win’ an argument with an idiot instead of just mocking them for the lulz…
It’s not about winning, or replying directly to just the troll/conflict bot.
It’s about leaving an elaboration of the initial opinion, for everyone else who comes by later to the topic and reads.
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”
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.
Never ever fall for that one. You can look at various regimes in the world what happens when “hate” gets censored. Demonitizing is one thing, technical implementations to “live censor hate” would be catastrophic.
I’m looking. Is something supposed to stand out about Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, New Zealand, Sweden, and the UK?
“Let’s tolerate the people that say they want to genocide entire ethnic groups” Surely nothing bad is gonna happen /s
Yes genocide is bad, but not taking their money is worse!
Like 1930s Germany did.
Sure, the Night of the Long Knives was bad, but not having it is worse!
How?
Troll?
Oh didn’t get it! Sorry for that.
So let me get this straight… They don’t like Nazis, but Nazis not making money is worse than Nazis making money?
No, people writing about sexy stuff and getting paid is worse than Nazis making money.
Edit: Being fair, the bible thumpers of old who established all the laws/morals which underlie most of the regulations today would take a big big problem with people writing sexy stuff. Nazis hating Jews would not be a big problem for them.
Anything related to sex or women’s sexuality that’s very bad.
Letting Nazi’s spread their hate, that’s good.
Says every social media, internet company ever.
That’s the part that gets me. If it were just not removing content, well, I’d probably still complain but they’d have a coherent freedom of speech argument. But… they have to pay Nazis to make Nazi content and take a cut, otherwise it’s censorship and that somehow helps the Nazis?
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…
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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).
This ignores that the platform is needed for that income to be possible. But truly you’re just being pedantic
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.
They are being paid by subscribers, not by substack. I am not on substack’s side here, but that detail seems quite relevant if we’re interested in painting an accurate picture of what’s going on.
If they were putting Nazi content on substack and no individuals were subscribing to read it, they would be earning 0.
Substack is profiting from those same subscribers, no doubt.
They are being paid by subscribers, not by substack.
Again- If you sold widgets door-to-door for a 20% commission, would you say you were being paid by the people who buy the widgets? I doubt many would.
In that case I’d be selling something made by the entity giving me commission - what people want and pay for is something made by someone other than me. In this case the people creating the content are the same people drawing the subscribers, so it’s more accurate to say substack takes a cut of their subscription income than to say substack pays them.
If I stop selling widgets the company still has the exact same widgets and can get anyone else to sell them. If a renowned nazi writer (bleh) takes their content to another platform, substack no longer has that content (or the author’s presence on their platform) to profit from.
what people want and pay for is something made by someone other than me.
Sort of like Substack’s servers then?
You think the platform is the widget, I think the content is the widget. I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree.
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).
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.
Yeah, people don’t seem to realize how insidious this shit is. Unfettered capitalism is allowing these fuckers to gain credibility and giving them a soapbox under the guise of “free speech.”
The desire for profit above all else, combined with the fact that the last of the people alive during (and old enough to understand) WW2 dying off, has been allowing fascism to wrap its filthy tendrils around our society once again. Preventing these people from taking power needs to be our priority, but unfortunately, constantly having to fight against this shit impedes all other progress.
Free speech is not absolute. Fascists (and particularly ones that call themselves Nazis) have no place in modern society, and they should be given no quarter because we’ve seen what happens if we don’t root them out.
This is not just a disagreement on policy, or a mere difference of opinion. These people want my friends dead.
Nazism isn’t an ideology, is a direct threat of violence. Anyone around a Nazi has a right to self defense rooted in natural law. That’s why is fine to punch Nazis.
So substack is a pro-nazi platform run by Nazi enablers, got it.
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”
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.
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.
In the old days, one would pay a small monthly fee and then you have your own website where you could basically do anything legal that you want. Is this no longer possible?
Because Idividual websites would be punished by search engines they were made a part of a bigger one, can we make better search engine to go around this?
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.
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.
White powder 🌨️
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.
Is there some specific background to “it’s okay to be white”? Without any context it does not sound obviously " white supremacist related to me, but it could be cultural, language or other.
It’s a Nazi talking point, one of their tropes is that white people are being eradicated everywhere because of multiculturalism and diversity, and that people are being taught it’s not ok to just be white. The slogan originated from 4chan trolling but Nazis have absolutely adopted it.
“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.
Substack: Nazis are cool, but you better not be selling sex related shit! We have standards!
“We do not condone Nazi propaganda, but we are very concerned about sex work causing social degeneracy.”
Substack is likely very concerned about the purity of the volk
Condone (transitive verb): To overlook, forgive, or disregard (an offense) without protest or censure.
Neat.
Interesting, I generally think of the Merriam-Webster definition:
to regard or treat (something bad or blameworthy) as acceptable, forgivable, or harmless
Or perhaps even further than that: actually approving of something. Guess “condone” is a little weaker of a word than I thought. But its popularity calls for being extra careful of even overlooking wrongdoing.
