- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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.”
This article is not about government censorship. This is about a private entity actively deciding to allow nazi content on their platform. Hand wringing about founding fathers belongs in some other thread where the topic is the government prohibiting content from being published.
I’m aware of how the first amendment applies, yes. I agree with the spirit of it in addition to the letter, though. You’re free to delete the one sentence where I talked about founding fathers, and respond to the whole rest of my message which doesn’t reference them or government censorship in any way.
(Edit: Actually, I wasn’t super explicit about it, but in the whole final paragraph I was thinking partly of government regulation to combat misinformation. That is, in part, what I meant by “organized opposition.” So, I spent time in my message referring to what the government should do to limit harmful internet content, and no time at all talking about what it shouldn’t do. I did throw in a passing reference to founding fathers, in reference to the spirit that I think should inform private companies who are non-governmental gatekeepers of content.)
Fine.
How is “can’t” happening, here? It’s not the government. Are you arguing against private entities having editorial freedom? Should private entities not be in charge of their own publications and platforms? And if they do choose to publish nazi stuff, shouldn’t the rest of us be free to say “Fuck off, nazi scum” ?
As I said to someone else, there is presumably a line that’s too much to cross. Is it “live stream of grinding up live babies and puppies and snorting them”? If there is no line, I don’t even know where to begin. That’s a whole other conversation. If there is a line, I think nazi content should be on the far side of it. Don’t you? And if the line is something like “whatever’s technically legal”, well that’s just punting responsibility to a slower, less responsive, ruleset run by the government.
Platforms taking some responsibility for what they allow would go a long way without requiring a heavy handed government solution. Substack could just say “nah, we’re not letting nazis post stuff.”
But if a platform is making a lot of money with nazi content, they’re probably going to be reluctant to deal with it. So if you still don’t want heavy government involvement (which can be a reasonable position, probably), you fall back to individuals saying “Fuck you. I’m not going to use your service while you serve nazis.”
But then you have several related problems. Something that’s a hugely dominant player in a market is hard to avoid. YouTube doesn’t have a lot of major competitors, for example, and is pretty ubiquitous. AWS is basically impossible to avoid. And on top of that, many people are apathetic or too busy trying to survive to spend a lot of time curating things.
What even is the spirit of it?
Yes, absolutely. Lemmy.world should be able to ban Nazis if they want to, as should Substack. Personally, I think it would be better in some cases if people didn’t. Although, there’s so much overlap between Nazis and general-toxic-behavior users that I wouldn’t really fault them for banning Nazis outright even if they theoretically supported the Nazis’ right to free speech.
Notably though, I think Substack should also be free to not ban Nazis, and no one should give them shit for it. In particular, they definitely shouldn’t be talking about trying to get their Stripe account cancelled, or pressuring their advertisers, as I’ve seen other posters here advocate for (although I think the thing about advertisers is just a result of pure confusion on the poster’s part about how Substack even makes income).
In this particular case, I think allowing the Nazis to speak is the “right answer,” so I definitely don’t advocate for interfering in anything Substack wants to do with their private servers. But no, I also don’t think anyone who doesn’t want to host Nazis should have to, and it’s a pretty good and reasonable question.
Let me say it this way: If what you’re doing or saying would be illegal, even if you weren’t a Nazi, it should be illegal. It shouldn’t suddenly become illegal to say if you’re wearing a Nazi uniform. Threatening violence? Illegal. Threatening violence as part of your Nazi political platform? Illegal. Wearing a Nazi uniform, saying that white people are superior and the holocaust didn’t happen? Legal as long as you’re not doing some other illegal thing, even though historically that’s adjacent to clearly-illegal behavior.
I realize there can be a good faith difference of opinion on that, but you asked me what I thought; that’s what I think. If it’s illegal to wear a Nazi uniform, or platforms kick you off for wearing one, then it can be illegal to wear a BLM shirt, and platforms can kick you off for saying #blacklivesmatter. Neither is acceptable. To me.
Probably the closest I can come to agreeing with you is on something like Patriot Front. Technically, is it legal to gather up and march around cities in threatening fashion, with the implication that you’ll attack anyone who tries to stop you? Sure. Is it dangerous? Fuck yes. Should it be legal? Um… maybe. I don’t know. Am I happy that people attacked them and chased them out of Philadelphia, even though attacking them was interfering with their free speech? Yes. I put that in a much more dangerous category than someone hosting a web site that says the holocaust didn’t happen.
Would it go a long way, though?
Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter have been trying to take responsibility for antivax stuff and election denialism for years now, and banned it in some cases and tried to limit its reach with simple blacklisting. Has that approach worked?
Nazi stuff is unpopular because it’s abhorrent and people can see that when they read it. I genuinely don’t think that allowing Nazi speech on Substack is a step towards wider acceptance of Naziism. I don’t think there are all these people who might have been Nazis but they’re prevented by not being able to read it on Substack. I do think allowing Nazi stuff on Substack would be a step towards exposing the wider community to the actual reality of Naziism, and exposing the Nazis to a community which can openly disagree with them instead of quarantining them in a place where they can only talk to each other.
I do think responsibility by the platforms is an important thing. I talked about that in terms of combatting organized disinformation, which is usually a lot more sophisticated and a lot more subtle than Nazi newsletters. I just don’t think banning the content is a good answer. Also, I suspect that the same people who want the Nazis off Substack also want lots of other non-Nazi content to be “forbidden” in the same way that, e.g. Dave Chappelle or Joe Rogan should be “forbidden” from their chosen platforms. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but that’s part of why I make a big deal about the Nazi content.
Thank you for the detailed response.
Substack can host nazis given the legal framework in the US. But why shouldn’t I speak up about their platforming of evil? Substack can do what they want, and I can tell them to fuck off. I can tell people who do business with them that I don’t approve, and I’m not going to do business with them while they’re engaged with this nazi loving platform. That’s just regular old freedom of speech and association.
Their speech is not more important than mine. There is no obligation for me to sit in silence when someone else is saying horrible things.
It feels like you’re arguing for free speech for the platform, but restricted speech for the audience. The platform is free to pick who can post there, but you don’t want the audience to speak back.
You’re conflating laws and government with private stuff. The bulk of this conversation is about what can private organizations do to moderate their platforms. Legality is only tangentially related. (Also it doesn’t necessarily follow that banning nazi uniforms would ban BLM t-shirts. Germany has some heavy bans on nazi imagery and to my knowledge have not slid enthusiastically down that slope)
A web forum I used to frequent banned pro-trump and pro-ice posts. The world didn’t end. They didn’t ban BLM. It helps that it was a forum run by people, and not an inscrutable god-machine or malicious genie running the place.
I’m also not sure I understood your answer to my question. Is there a line other than “technically legal” that you don’t want crossed? Is the law actually a good arbiter?
I don’t think they’ve actually been trying very hard. They make a lot of money by not doing much. Google’s also internally incompetent (see: their many, many, canceled projects), Facebook is evil (see: that time they tried to make people sad to see if they could), and twitter has always had a child’s understanding of free speech.
A related problem here is probably the consolidation of platforms. Twitter and Facebook as so big that banning someone from it is a bigger deal than it probably should be. But they are free to move to a more permissive platform if their content is getting them kicked out of popular places. We’re not talking about a nationwide, government backed-by-force content ban.
I’m not sure what to do about coordinated disinformation. Platforms banning or refusing to host some of it is probably one part of the remedy, though.
Oh, yeah, you can say whatever you like.
I think you’re right that I was a little fuzzy when I talked about things that were illegal versus things I personally don’t like, yeah. You should obviously be able (legally and what-I-think-is-right wise) to say anything you like about Substack. And, they are legally able to do whatever they want with their servers, whether that involves allowing or banning or demonetizing Nazis or whatever. Most of my conversation was about what I think they should do with their servers, but it’s just my opinion. And yes I think you should be able to state your opinion and I should be able to disagree with it and all that.
You asked before what I meant about the “spirit” of the first amendment. What I meant was, there’s a specific purpose why it was enshrined into law, and the same principles that led to that legal framework also produce some implications for how the operator of a communication network “should” treat that network, in my opinion, especially as it grows to the size of something like Facebook and starts to wield power similar to a government in terms of deciding how people should be able to communicate with each other. But yes, this is all just what I feel about it, and you’re free to disagree or say fuck Substack or organize a boycott or whatever you like.
Once it gets into, we need to pressure their advertisers and try to force them to run their servers in a more Nazi-hostile way, I really don’t like that. It is legal, yes. But it’s coercive. It’s like a high-pressure salesman or a slimy romantic partner. All perfectly legal things. But I think that’s crossing a whole new line into something bad, much worse than Substack just doing something with their moderation I personally think they shouldn’t be doing.
Sure. So, I actually don’t like that type of thing (although it is, of course, legal, and I’d defend the rights of those forum operators to do it if they chose). I got banned from a few different subreddits, both left and right wing which was funny to me, because people didn’t like what I said. That’s, honestly, pretty infuriating. I’ve also talked with conservative people who got suspended temporarily from Facebook, or had their posts taken down because they were antivax or whatever. Did I agree with those posts? Absolutely not, and I argued with them about it. Do I agree they should have had their posts removed? No. I started out thinking that yes, removing the posts is fine, and told them that more or less Facebook could do whatever they wanted because it was their network, but after having the argument a certain number of times I started to sympathize a lot more with the point of view of “dude fuck you, I’m a human being, just let me say what I want to say.” I don’t think that simple removal of the post, or chasing people off the “main” shared network completely, and onto a Nazis-only network like Truth Social, is the answer. I’ll say this, it definitely didn’t make them less antivax when that happened, or make it at all difficult for them to find antivax propaganda.
That’s different from actual Nazi posts, of course. Just saying some of my experience with this. I actually don’t like a lot of lemmy.world culture that’s developing now because it is starting to become this sort of monoculture, where only a particular variety of views are allowed. Like it really irks me that pro-police or conservative viewpoints get shit on so relentlessly that it basically chases those people away. I liked that reddit had both /r/protectandserve and /r/badcopnodonut. It’s fine. Let people talk, and don’t start yelling at them that they have the “wrong” view (although of course you can always tell them why you think they’re wrong). I have plenty of “wrong” views from the POV of the Lemmy hivemind, so maybe I’m more invested in it as an issue because of that.
Fair question. I mean, at the end of the day each server operator can do what they like. Some people will say that Nazis or MAGA people are so frequently trolls that they just don’t want to deal with them. Some people don’t want porn. Some people want to run a forum that’s explicitly pro-conservative and just get tired of left-wing people coming in and jeering at them. All those things sound fine to me (what-I-like wise as well as legally). I don’t think it’s my business to tell people where to draw that type of line.
To me, though, that principle “I may not agree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it” is super important. If you start saying only certain viewpoints are welcome, and dismiss the others not with open debate but with loud jeering or technical restrictions, it hurts the discourse on your server. Of course you’re legally allowed to restrict people’s access however you like. But to me, I would draw the line by disallowing illegal things or things that hurt the discourse (because of trolling or brigading or deceptive bot posts or whatever). But if someone’s just coming in and saying something you think is absolutely dead wrong (e.g. that the holocaust didn’t happen), I don’t think it’s your place to remove or ban them. I think you should allow that.
Does that better answer the question? That’s just my take on it. I’ve never been a modern Lemmy-instance operator, so maybe seeing it first hand and dealing with child porn from angry MAGA people or bomb threats from Nazis and things like that would make me less sympathetic.
I can only say what I’ve observed in terms of restrictions on Facebook posts from people I know, or Youtube creators I know who got demonetized or otherwise chased off Youtube. All of that, I think sucks. I agree, it’s kind of heavy-handed and brainless the way they’re doing it. I think that’s an additional issue in addition to the fact of censoring the ability of people to post being the wrong approach in the first place.
I think one of the core issues is that a huge for-profit company running a huge content network, where they don’t have bandwidth to put much attention into moderation and where most of the architecture of the network is designed to extract revenue from it, is just wrong from start to finish. That’s why I’m here right now as opposed to Facebook or wherever. When I talk about free speech issues I’m mostly talking about it in terms of things like Lemmy or Substack. But yeah, maybe you’re right that issues of profit motive and moderation bandwidth mean that we can’t draw much of any conclusion by looking at how things played out on the big networks.
Thank you for your detailed reply, again.
Why do you find people using their limited economic power coercive? You say you like boycotts. Telling Tide that you saw their advertisement on a nazi blog so you’re not going to buy Tide until that’s remedied is a boycott.
You also have to account for the audience. While that person may have gotten mad and gone off to a right extremist website, removing their “Holocaust is a lie check out these posts [nazi propaganda link 1, 2, 3]” post up is a hazard. Many more people read forums than contribute, typically.
There are some points of view that are so hashed out, it is unlikely to be worth our time to debate them again. Nazi ideology, for example, was pretty firmly settled as bad. The forum I mentioned before had a clear “We are not going to debate if gay people have rights” rule. Someone might want to make an argument that they don’t, but the belief that they do is so axiomatic for the locale it’s not worth entertaining the “debate”. I do not think it hurts the discourse on your server to disallow some topics like that. I say this with the assumption that the people running the forum are human, and it’s not a shitty algorithm trying to parse it, or some underpaid intern who barely speaks the language. There is a hypothetical bad case where an imaginary server prescribes the exact beliefs that are OK and enforces that with moderation powers, but that’s spherical friction-less cow levels removed from my lived experience. Maybe I’ve just been lucky where I’ve spent time on the internet. But also, if a forum sucks you can usually just leave. (Another argument for why the megalith sites like facebook and twitter aren’t great.)
So we disagree on this point. I don’t see any good coming from platforming holocaust deniers or homophobes or whatever. If I’m running a bar, I don’t need to let the nazis have their meetup in the back booth. That’s just going to draw more nazis, and probably scare off the regular people. Likewise, if I’m running a forum, I don’t need to let them have their little soapbox in my figurative bar.
I’ve also never run a forum. I expect there’s a big “for me it was tuesday” experience. For the guy who wants to debate if queer couples really need to get married, it’s the first time he’s ever waded into this topic. For the moderation team, it’s tuesday, and the fourth time this has come up this week. I expect dealing with the worst sorts of people would take the shine off anyone’s idealism.
This sub-thread is very long and I’m starting to lose focus. I don’t think we agree on everything, but I appreciate that you’ve been civil.