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.”
It all depends on the nature and goals of the platform.
It's one thing to create a platform for positivity and brave new world (in a good sense). It's good we have those, and this probably should be the approach of mainstream media.
It's another to create a truly free speech platform. You can't claim free speech and then ideologically ban someone, even if that's someone bad. And you should have such venues - for among 9 terrible ideas (like Nazism) lies one that is underappreciated and misunderstood, and wrongly considered to be bad. Feminism was considered to be bad. LGBT people were considered to be bad etc. etc. And if you start banning some ideas, it leaves you with carte blanche to ban everyone you don't like, including people who actually promote healthy and positive ideas and values, but are misunderstood.
Only leaving the first option means starting a circlejerk where no good new idea has a chance to flourish.
As per Nazis, homophobes and other people with terrible ideas - you really can't overcome it by just pulling it under the rug. We need to develop patience and advance our rhetorics to counter those, and to quickly seed that grain of truth from which all their misconceptions get to shatter. That's literally the only way to combat ideology - by exposing how deeply wrong and flawed it is, and providing arguments.
Will there be people with no reason following such ideologies out of spite and emotion? Sure. But by stepping against them on an equal footing, we can show the rest how stupid their arguments are, rven on a dedicated free speech platform.
Because Nazism is not bad simply because we decided it to be so. It is a faulty ideology meant to distract people from real sources of their struggle while expending millions of lives in the process.
It removes critical understanding of economic processes by the masses, fooling them into believing the issues are caused by some nation and not their own elites - something that is well-researched and obvious to almost every other modern individual.
In order to retain people's decisiveness amongst deep economic crisis directly caused by application of such ideology (due to rampant expropriation, paranoid protectionism, economic mismanagement and removal of active economic participants), Nazi government always needs to wage a war - this way it can blame its faults on its enemies. And war inevitably comes with millions of deaths, deaths directly attributed to the ideology cause it can't run without them.
Finally, it's an ideology based on hate to a group with an immutable property - it ignores the differences all of us have and tries to attribute a certain property to an entire nation - something we know isn't true - and then exterminate people based on what is known to be wrong association.
No matter how you look at it, under any rational look, Nazism is just plain stupid, and in its stupidity it produces extreme and unnecessary suffering.
With all that being said, again, I don't think we should make platforms like Substack mainstream and we should moderate general-topic places to exclude Nazis and other harmful actors. But we sure as hell need them to be present.
Because the only thing worse than Nazis allowed to influence us is the tyranny of subjective good.
Banning nazis is not a slippery slope.
I'll just give an example.
Recently, when discussing defederated instances, I've seen an interesting picture: people cheered defederating instances of Nazis and...pedophiles.
An average person would see no issue here. Right, one more terrible group banned! Take those perverts down! But there's a catch that I discovered quite a while ago, and it's a rabbit hole like no other.
And when you see something like that, you clearly understand that there's a lot of things in the world people still heavily misunderstand, while feeling certain about the position they didn't have 5 minutes to research on, and that people are already on the slippery slope, banning groups they didn't have time and effort to comprehend. And there's a lot more of that than just pedophiles, this is just a very bright example that will probably make most of those reading this uncomfortable and will illustrate the concept best.
Also, I'm full aware that most people will likely choose to downvote this, not comment anything and end up thinking I support child molesters (hell no, if you support child molestation go get some mental health asap, fucking kids is very bad)
If all the content on those instances was ai generated then your hot take could be taken seriously. We all know it's not.
I'm talking specifically about instances with strong rules, either prohibiting any child imagery or only allowing drawings (which is just about any anti-contact place). Both types are heavily defederated from, and barely anyone makes a difference between that and literal child porn instances (which should be not just defederated, but seized by authorities and admins brought to justice)
I've updated third bullet point in accordance with your comment, thank you.