Substack Turns On Its ‘Nazis Welcome!’ Sign

Content Moderation

from the your-reputation-is-what-you-allow dept

Back in April Substack founder/CEO Chris Best gave an interview to Nilay Patel in which he refused to answer some fairly basic questions about how the company planned to handle trust & safety issues on their new Substack Notes microblogging service. As I noted at the time, Best seemed somewhat confused about how all this worked, and by refusing to be explicit in their policies he was implicitly saying that Substack welcomed Nazis. As we noted, this was the classic “Nazi bar” scenario: if you’re not kicking out Nazis, you get the reputation as “the Nazi bar” even if you, yourself, don’t like Nazis.

What I tried to make clear in that post (which some people misread) was that the main issue I had was Best trying to act as if his refusal to make a statement wasn’t a statement. As I noted, if you’re going to welcome Nazis to a private platform, don’t pretend you’re not doing that. Be explicit about it. Here’s what I said at the time:

If you’re not going to moderate, and you don’t care that the biggest draws on your platform are pure nonsense peddlers preying on the most gullible people to get their subscriptions, fucking own it, Chris.

Say it. Say that you’re the Nazi bar and you’re proud of it.

Say “we believe that writers on our platform can publish anything they want, no matter how ridiculous, or hateful, or wrong.” Don’t hide from the question. You claim you’re enabling free speech, so own it. Don’t hide behind some lofty goals about “freedom of the press” when you’re really enabling “freedom of the grifters.”

You have every right to allow that on your platform. But the whole point of everyone eventually coming to terms with the content moderation learning curve, and the fact that private businesses are private and not the government, is that what you allow on your platform is what sticks to you. It’s your reputation at play.

And your reputation when you refuse to moderate is not “the grand enabler of free speech.” Because it’s the internet itself that is the grand enabler of free speech. When you’re a private centralized company and you don’t deal with hateful content on your site, you’re the Nazi bar.

Most companies that want to get large enough recognize that playing to the grifters and the nonsense peddlers works for a limited amount of time, before you get the Nazi bar reputation, and your growth is limited. And, in the US, you’re legally allowed to become the Nazi bar, but you should at least embrace that, and not pretend you have some grand principled strategy.

The key point: your reputation as a private site is what you allow. If you allow garbage, you’re a garbage site. If you allow Nazis, you’re a Nazi site. You’re absolutely allowed to do that, but you shouldn’t pretend to be something that you’re not. You should own it, and say “these are our policies, and we realize what our reputation is.”

Substack has finally, sorta, done that. But, again, in the dumbest way possible.

A few weeks back, the Atlantic ran an article by Jonathan Katz with the headline Substack Has a Nazi Problem. In what should be no surprise given what happened earlier this year with Best’s interview, the Nazis very quickly realized that Substack was a welcome home for them:

An informal search of the Substack website and of extremist Telegram channels that circulate Substack posts turns up scores of white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi newsletters on Substack—many of them apparently started in the past year. These are, to be sure, a tiny fraction of the newsletters on a site that had more than 17,000 paid writers as of March, according to Axios, and has many other writers who do not charge for their work. But to overlook white-nationalist newsletters on Substack as marginal or harmless would be a mistake.

At least 16 of the newsletters that I reviewed have overt Nazi symbols, including the swastika and the sonnenrad, in their logos or in prominent graphics. Andkon’s Reich Press, for example, calls itself “a National Socialist newsletter”; its logo shows Nazi banners on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, and one recent post features a racist caricature of a Chinese person. A Substack called White-Papers, bearing the tagline “Your pro-White policy destination,” is one of several that openly promote the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that inspired deadly mass shootings at a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, synagogue; two Christchurch, New Zealand, mosques; an El Paso, Texas, Walmart; and a Buffalo, New York, supermarket. Other newsletters make prominent references to the “Jewish Question.” Several are run by nationally prominent white nationalists; at least four are run by organizers of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—including the rally’s most notorious organizer, Richard Spencer.

Some Substack newsletters by Nazis and white nationalists have thousands or tens of thousands of subscribers, making the platform a new and valuable tool for creating mailing lists for the far right. And many accept paid subscriptions through Substack, seemingly flouting terms of service that ban attempts to “publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes.” Several, including Spencer’s, sport official Substack “bestseller” badges, indicating that they have at a minimum hundreds of paying subscribers. A subscription to the newsletter that Spencer edits and writes for costs $9 a month or $90 a year, which suggests that he and his co-writers are grossing at least $9,000 a year and potentially many times that. Substack, which takes a 10 percent cut of subscription revenue, makes money when readers pay for Nazi newsletters.

Again, none of this should be surprising. If you signal publicly that you allow Nazis (and allow them to make money), don’t be surprised when the Nazis arrive. In droves. Your reputation is what you allow.

And, of course, once that happens some other users might realize they don’t want to support the platform that supports Nazis. So a bunch of Substackers got together and sent a group letter saying they didn’t want to be on a site supporting Nazis and wanted to know what the Substack founders had to say for themselves.

From our perspective as Substack publishers, it is unfathomable that someone with a swastika avatar, who writes about “The Jewish question,” or who promotes Great Replacement Theory, could be given the tools to succeed on your platform. And yet you’ve been unable to adequately explain your position. 

In the past you have defended your decision to platform bigotry by saying you “make decisions based on principles not PR” and “will stick to our hands-off approach to content moderation.” But there’s a difference between a hands-off approach and putting your thumb on the scale. We know you moderate some content, including spam sites and newsletters written by sex workers. Why do you choose to promote and allow the monetization of sites that traffic in white nationalism? 

Eventually, the Substack founders had to respond. They couldn’t stare off into the distance like Best did during the Nilay Patel interview in April. So another founder, Hamish McKenzie, finally published a Note saying “yes, we allow Nazis and we’re not going to stop.” Of course, as is too often the case on these things, he tried to couch it as a principled stance:

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.

We believe that supporting individual rights and civil liberties while subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power. We are committed to upholding and protecting freedom of expression, even when it hurts. As @Ted Gioia has noted, history shows that censorship is most potently used by the powerful to silence the powerless. (Ted’s note: substack.com/profile/4937458-ted-gioia/…) 

Our content guidelines do have narrowly defined proscriptions, including a clause that prohibits incitements to violence. We will continue to actively enforce those rules while offering tools that let readers curate their own experiences and opt in to their preferred communities. Beyond that, we will stick to our decentralized approach to content moderation, which gives power to readers and writers.

So this is, more or less, what I had asked them to do back in April. If you’re going to host Nazis just say “yes, we host Nazis.” And, I even think it’s fair to say that you’re doing that because you don’t think that moderation does anything valuable, and certainly doesn’t stop people from being Nazis. And, furthermore, I also think Substack is correct that its platform is slightly more decentralized than systems like ExTwitter or Facebook, where content mixes around and gets promoted. Since most of Substack is individual newsletters and their underlying communities, it’s more equivalent to Reddit, where the “moderation” questions are pushed further to the edges: you have some moderation that is centralized from the company, some that is just handled by people deciding whether or not to subscribe to certain Substacks (or subreddits), and some that is decided by the owner of each Substack (or moderators of each subreddit).

And Hamish and crew are also not wrong that censorship is frequently used by the powerful to silence the powerless. This is why we are constantly fighting for free speech rights here, and against attempts to change that, because we know how frequently those rights are abused.

But the Substack team is mixing up “free speech rights” — which involve what the government can limit — with their own expressive rights and their own reputation. I don’t support laws that stop Nazis from saying what they want to say, but that doesn’t mean I allow Nazis to put signs on my front lawn. This is the key fundamental issue anyone discussing free speech has to understand. There is a vast and important difference between (1) the government passing laws that stifle speech and (2) private property owners deciding whether or not they wish to help others, including terrible people, speak.

Because, as private property owners, you have your own free speech rights in the rights of association. So while I support the rights of Nazis to speak, that does not mean I’m going to assist them in using my property to speak, or assist them in making money.

Substack has chosen otherwise. They are saying that they will not just allow Nazis to use their property, but they will help fund those Nazis.

That’s a choice. And it’s a choice that should impact Substack’s own reputation.

Ken “Popehat” White explained it well in his own (yes, Substack) post on all of this.

First, McKenzie’s post consistently blurs the roles and functions of the state and the individual. For instance, he pushes the hoary trope that censoring Nazis just drives them underground where they are more dangerous: “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.” That may be true for the state, but is it really true for private actors? Do I make the Nazi problem worse by blocking Nazis who appear in my comments? Does a particular social media platform make Nazis worse by deciding that they, personally, are not going to host Nazis? How do you argue that, when there are a vast array of places for Nazis to post on the internet? Has Gab fallen? Is Truth Social no more?

McKenzie continues the blurring by suggesting that being platformed by private actors is a civil right: “We believe that supporting individual rights and civil liberties while subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power. We are committed to upholding and protecting freedom of expression, even when it hurts.” That’s fine, but nobody has the individual right, civil liberty, or freedom of expression to be on Substack if Substack doesn’t want them there. In fact that’s part of Substack’s freedom of expression and civil liberties — to build the type of community it wants, that expresses its values. If Substack’s values is “we publish everybody” (sort of, as noted below) that’s their right, but a different approach doesn’t reflect a lack of support for freedom of expression. McKenzie is begging the question — assuming his premise that support of freedom of expression requires Substack to accept Nazis, not just for the government to refrain from suppressing Nazis.

As Ken further notes, Substack’s own terms of service and the moderation they already do does already block plenty of 1st Amendment protected speech, including hate speech, sexually explicit content, doxxing, and spam. There are good reasons that a site might block any of that speech, but it then stands out when you decide to say “but, whoa whoa whoa, Nazis, that’s a step too far, and an offense to free speech.” It’s all about choices.

Your reputation is what you allow. And Substack has decided that its reputation is “sex is bad, but Nazis are great.”

Or, as White notes:

My point is not that any of these policies is objectionable. But, like the old joke goes, we’ve established what Substack is, now we’re just haggling over the price. Substack is engaging in transparent puffery when it brands itself as permitting offensive speech because the best way to handle offensive speech is to put it all out there to discuss. It’s simply not true. Substack has made a series of value judgments about which speech to permit and which speech not to permit. Substack would like you to believe that making judgments about content “for the sole purpose of sexual gratification,” or content promoting anorexia, is different than making judgment about Nazi content. In fact, that’s not a neutral, value-free choice. It’s a valued judgment by a platform that brands itself as not making valued judgments. Substack has decided that Nazis are okay and porn and doxxing isn’t. The fact that Substack is engaging in a common form of free-speech puffery offered by platforms doesn’t make it true.

And this is exactly the argument that we keep trying to make and have been trying to make for years about content moderation questions. Supporting free speech has to mean supporting free speech against government attempts at suppression and also supporting the right of private platforms to make their own decisions about to allow and what not to allow. Because if you say that private platforms must allow all speech, then you don’t actually get more speech. You get a lot less. Because most platforms will decide they don’t want to be enabling Nazis, and only the ones who eagerly cater to Nazis survive. That leaves fewer places to speak, and fewer people willing to speak in places adjacent to Nazis.

Substack has every right to make the choices it has made, but it shouldn’t pretend that it’s standing up for civil rights or freedoms, because it’s not. It’s making value judgments that everyone can see, and its value judgment is “Nazis are welcome, sex workers aren’t.”

Your reputation is what you allow. Substack has hung out its shingle saying “Nazis welcome.”

Everyone else who uses the platform now gets to decide whether or not they wish to support the site that facilitates the funding of Nazis. Some will. Some will find the tradeoffs acceptable. But others won’t. I’ve already seen a few prominent Substack writers announce that they have moved or that they’re intending to do so.

These are all free speech decisions as well. Substack has made its decision. Substack has declared what its reputation is going to be. I support the company’s free speech rights to make that choice. But that does not mean I need to support the platform personally.

Your reputation is what you allow and Substack has chosen to support Nazis.

Filed Under: chris best, content moderation, free speech, hamish mckenzie, hate speech, nazi bar, nazis, reputation, trust and safety
Companies: substack