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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.”
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.”
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?
This reminds me of this comic:
“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.
This tracks with my previous attempts at reporting that Sinfest guy. Posts hundreds of comics that blatantly break multiple official substack content guidelines and I get the effective equivalent of a promise for “action” combined with a dismissive eye roll. They completely ignored my follow-up email detailing the complete lack of action and the dozen or so new content guideline violations.
Here’s a Wired article featuring four good alternatives to Substack.
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 animals
or more specifically justanimals
and 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.
Oh yeah that’s the classic. The interviewer describes himself as one of the targets, even, and that still doesn’t make it real for this fuck.
So they have no rules, any content is acceptable?
Anything less is “censorship” after all
Cool… so they now facilitate and directly benefit from Nazi activity. Sounds great when you put it like that.
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wow that’s terrible, that they’d circlejerk each other instead of having a mass audience to post propaganda to. I can’t imagine a worse outcome
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.
If a Nazi has a large subscription following than Substack would be directly profiting from Nazi content.
I want them to explain how it makes things worse.
“We would make less money, and that’s worse than more money.”
Good for them. I’m all for allowing people make their own choices about what kind of content they want to see instead of a corporation/government deciding for them.
I can’t think of a single thing we’ve succesfully gotten rid of by banning it. I however can think of several examples where it has had an opposite effect.
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.