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.

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.

“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.

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 just animals 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.

Here’s a Wired article featuring four good alternatives to Substack.

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.

So they have no rules, any content is acceptable?

Anything less is “censorship” after all

Ehhh, it’s one of those things where I agree with the principle, but the principle fails. It’s the so called tolerance paradox (which isn’t actually a paradox at all, but that’s tangential).

On principle, no company should be in the business of deciding what is and isn’t acceptable “speech”. That’s simply not something we really want happening.

But then there’s nazis and other outright insane bigots. But we still don’t really want companies making that call, because they’ll decide on the side of profit, period. If enough of the nazi types get enough power and money going, every single fucking company out there that isn’t owned by a single person, or very small group of people that share the same ideals, is going to be deciding that it’s the nazi bullshit that’s the only acceptable speech.

This is something that has to come from the bottom to the top and be decided on a legal level first. We absolutely can ban nazi type bullshit if we want to. There’s plenty of room for it to be pointed at as the incitement to violence that it is. There need to be very specific, very limited definitions to govern what is and isn’t part of that

And the limitations have to be impossible to expand without starting all the way over with the kind of stringency it takes to amend the constitution.

That takes it out of the hands of corporations, and makes it very difficult to game. But it has to come from us, as a people first.

Gen Z needs to understand the historical lesson that the Blues Brothers taught those before them. Illinois Nazis exist, and some days they demonstrate, as per their right to freedom of speech - but this is as much as an opportunity to humiliate them and openly critique the mindset as anyone else. Dark little underground communities flourish behind closed doors.

TIL that Substack is apparently a bunch of crypto-fascists who expect people to believe they don’t support Nazis, they just give them money and a place at their table to talk about it.

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.

Translated: McKenzie just wants the sweet money and is trying to gaslight us into thinking platforming nazis is ok.

If a Nazi has a large subscription following than Substack would be directly profiting from Nazi content.

I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views.

“But we’ll gladly host those views on our platform, run ads alongside them, and profit from them.”

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.