“We don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away.”

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.”

  • jjjalljsEnglish
    1·
    6 months ago

    Thank you for your detailed reply, again.

    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. Ok but…

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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

    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.)

    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.

    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.

    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’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.