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- cross-posted to:
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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.”
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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.
“I want you to know that I don’t like nazis. But I am fine platforming them and profiting from them. Now here is some bullshit about silencing ‘ideas.’”
“I don’t like Nazis… but you have to understand, they’re very profitable.”
If there are 10 nazis at a table and you decide to sit among them, there are 11 nazis sitting at that table.
So you think Deeyah Khan is a Nazi?
(I’d encourage anyone to watch White Right: Meeting the Enemy if you haven’t seen it.)
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Out of curiosity, let’s say a man needs a place for sleep, and for get one, he decides to help out a nazi, for example by fixing their long distance radio, would you call this person a nazi,@[email protected] ?
Why couldn’t the man go to a homeless shelter, or a church, or a bus stop, or a park bench, or literally anywhere other than a Nazi’s house? Also, what does a Nazi need a long distance radio for? Maybe by fixing it and not asking questions he’s helping them coordinate with other fascists to hurt and kill people. Is that worth a place to sleep for a night? Is it worth a few bucks if you’re not homeless but actually a wealthy business owner who can do as they please?
Why couldn’t the man go to a homeless shelter, or a church, or a bus stop, or a park bench, or literally anywhere other than a Nazi’s house? No homeless shelter, church, or a bus stop, park bench wasn’t a possibility, as there was german patrols watching the town. Also, what does a Nazi need a long distance radio for? For hear the news from Germany. Long distance radio was quite popular in the 40s. You could hear radios from the other side of a continent with those. Is that worth a place to sleep for a night? If it prevents you to get arrested by the Nazis, and questioned, I would say yes.
The man I mention in my post is this guy As he was visiting the french riviera gathering intels for the british intelligence, he got in the situation I described in my previous post.
Did you bring him up because you believe Hamish MacKenzie is doing some kind of anti-Nazi spy operations nobody else knows about? Because the contexts here are so different that they’re only tangentially related.
Just an example that "If there are 10 nazis at a table… " has plenty of exceptions, like Daryl Davis with kkk members.
So do you want the saying to be “if there are 10 Nazis at a table and 1 person who isn’t a Nazi, then there are 11 Nazis at a table, unless the 1 person is actually an anti-Nazi spy, and then it’s okay, and also there are probably other exceptions”? Or do you think maybe that saying was obviously never intended to apply to that the first place?
“No no, but what if the guy is just, like, at the table because he’s Nazi- curious but kind totally didn’t kill anybody and probably wouldn’t but also the Nazis make good points about stuff so he can totally sit there, but he’s not a Nazi! See? There are exceptions!”
-that guy, probably
The very occasional exception to the saying doesn’t make the saying less applicable in this particular situation.
A lot of people died rather than help them so yes I would judge the shit out of someone that helps a nazi knowing full well what they are.
The person I mention in my previous post, is this man. As he was along the french riviera, looking for intels, he ended in this situation, that there was no vacancy in hotels, and he finally got a hotel room, by fixing the long distance radio. How do you judge the shit out of him, by curiosity ?
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Nazis don’t deserve help. They fundamentally are antisocial in their ideology. By helping them, you aid a Nazi. Why would you willingly help a Nazi?
Who the fuck feels safe sleeping among Nazis? That’s a good way to get robbed.
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Hearing some one out and not changing your viewpoint after the conversation, doesn’t make you one of them. 🙄
Thing is, we’ve heard out the nazis before. We don’t need to do that anymore.
Exactly. It’s the paradox of tolerance.
I like Michael Okuda’s take on this:
The Paradox of Tolerance disappears if you look at tolerance, NOT as a moral standard, but as a social contract. If someone does not abide by the terms of the contract, they are not covered by it. In other words, the intolerant aren’t deserving of your tolerance.
Personally, I think there’s some value in allowing the Nazis to publicly self-identify, because then we know who the Nazis are. We (society) don’t need to tolerate what they say just to prove that we’re tolerant, but it’s probably useful to know who they are, and for them to volunteer that information. Then we respond with public ridicule and name-and-shame.
Also, that doesn’t require that a privately owned business (e.g. substack) should provide a platform for Nazi bullshit.
Michael Okuda is one of the great contributors to design thanks to the influences of Star Trek: The Next Generation and later shows- he was behind a lot of the look- and almost no one knows who he is. It’s a real shame since, as you showed here, he’s smart in other ways too.
There are some things not worth listening to. Not all opinions are created equal.
Nazi lives don’t matter.
Zero tolerance for nazis. Zero.
Agreed. However, providing a platform for hate speech is no different than condoning it.
My viewpoint is that I dont have any obligation to “hear out” a nazi. And neither does anyone else. GTFO with this “even nazis should be given a fair shake” shit.
issuing correction on a previous post of mine, regarding the terror group ISIL. you do not, under any circumstances, 'gotta hand it to them
-Dril
But hearing them out and deciding to allow them to promote their views on your website is passive endorsement.
Or, to follow the metaphor: if you hear them out over entrees and you’re still sitting there during dessert, then you’re probably one of them.
When it comes to listening to hate speech and not condoning it outrright then and there, even if you don’t explicitly support it, it does make you complicit, and it shows you’re willing to turn a blind eye to it, and that speaks negatively to your character.
Don’t be a Nazi sympathizer, don’t let them off the hook, don’t let them spread their hate and lies. You disagree with Nazism? Then don’t give it even an inch to spread. Kill it in the cradle.
No, but thinking a Nazi has valuable information to offer is sus.
Big difference between having a conversation and having a media company distributing propaganda.
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Freedom of speech doesn’t mean that you are obligated to host a platform so shitty people can use it to share shitty ideals. It simply means that you won’t get arrested on a federal level.
Websites can do whatever they want, including deciding that they don’t want to be a platform for hate speech. If people are seeking a place for this conversation genre to happen, and they want it enough, they can run their own website.
Imagine if you invited a friend of a friend over, and they were sharing nasty ideals at your Christmas party. And they brought their friends. Are you just going to sit there and let them turn your dinner into a political rally? No, you’re going to kick them out. It’s your dinner, like it is your website. If you don’t kick them out, then at some level, you’re aligning with them.
I like your example there a lot, I’m going to use that in the future when I’m trying to express that notion. In the past I’ve never been able to articulate that exact concept. So thanks!
Do not tolerate the intolerant.
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.
Never ever fall for that one. You can look at various regimes in the world what happens when “hate” gets censored. Demonitizing is one thing, technical implementations to “live censor hate” would be catastrophic.
I’m looking. Is something supposed to stand out about Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, New Zealand, Sweden, and the UK?
There is real time censorship present anywhere in europe? Nowhere near. We have “you have to act within certain time” laws when content gets flaged, that’s all. You could argue forcing DNS resolvers to block certain domains is censorhip though. Look at China. Talk bad about politics in your private chats with your mates, i’m sure your censorship dream will do you and your family well! Heck even talking about Winnie poh is “hate” or was this not true?
Again, demonitize them as you want. But censorship just leads to the groups isolating more and more from the world.
Just look at the beliefs of people witch a member of cults (or religions if you want) - thousands of people which are explicitly denied via rules to gather knowledge in the internet (looking at you Mormons). I’d like to call that psychological censorship - it aims for the same goal in a way but I get way to off topic
Actually, yes. In the UK people (including Jewish people) are being arrested and jailed for speaking out against Israeli naziism and genocide as inciting “hate.”
That example is literally EXACTLY why people, myself included, believe that the censoring of certain types of speech needs to remain exclusively a private enterprise.
That’s an interesting point. On one hand Israel is the way it is because right wing nationalism has been normalized through open and free speech in the US. But Israel is also where it is because of the conflation of the meaning of antisemitism shutting down anyone challenging it. Though, I am seeing that conflation being properly challenged more so now than ever before but it’s obviously not fast enough. It’s probably time to implement looking more at collective actions more than words within governmental policy writing. As in mass killings = bad. I wish humans didn’t suck.
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Your username is disgusting.
Do you not know who Dick Tracy is?
Yeah I chose it because I wanted to be a dipshit hipster edgelord 😎
I like to accuse people of blocking me because I don’t understand how Lemmy works.
Right? Me too. When replies disappear from my inbox that’s when I know: “I am just a weird idiot”. In addition to the refrain in my brain: I like to have people imagine sexual bodily fluids oozing from the devil’s bunghole with rotting meat and maggots. Due to this, I also confirm that I am definitely cool and popular with all the other Internet hipsters"
I wanted to be a mall cop but after failing both the physical and psychological screening I decided to tell other people how they should use social media.
It’s all about making the world a better place, you know?
not everyone who doesn’t want to censor nazis is a nazi. while i think hate has no place anywhere online, i agree that free speech is important. substack should definetely stop someone hateful from earning money on that platform one way or another.
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They can’t. That would break the illusion of being an “enlightened centrist.”
I.E. votes right wing, sees themselves as slightly more moderate, but sympathizer and defender of the far right and Nazis.
Or one of the many foreign troll farms found to be pushing the “enlightened centrist” narrative.
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i’m by no means any kind of centrist or right leaning and i do have very strong opinions about nazis. but free speech on the internet is a very important thing, while i also believe hate speech should be censored.
tl;dr, conflicting opinions != Nazi, dumbass.
It’s not the conflicting opinions. It’s your lack of commitment to your own professed opinions. You literally stated you believe hate speech should be censored. But all your arguments to this point are that they should not. Where is your consistency?
Pressing X to doubt
Why are you so combative? You responded to a post rebutting a desire to censor speech from a legal perspective. Being opposed to defining any speech as illegal and being a nazi sympathizer are two very different things. You do not, in fact, have to choose one.
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i don’t think i will, this is complicated and i don’t care enough. i am not taking sides.
🤡
Won’t work here, on here it is black or white, either hate Nazis and anything that even approaches it or you are one. Every other subject in the world will be grey and nuanced, and they will argue minor points to death, except for this.
If you do not support removing Nazis from the public sphere, you aren’t necessarily a Nazi. But you do support Nazis. That didn’t make a difference between 1939 and 1945 and it doesn’t make a difference now.
Do you have a Meta or Substack stamp on your passport?
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.
Not exactly. Substack subscribers pay subscription fees, the content author keeps roughly 80% of the fees, and the rest goes to Substack or to offset hosting costs. The Nazi subscribers are paying the Nazi publishers, and money is flowing from the Nazi subscribers to Substack because of that operation (not away from Substack as it would be if they hired Nazis).
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How is it pedantic to point out that “will pay for them” means “will get paid by them”?
There’s a perfectly good argument to be made that Substack shouldn’t host Nazis even if they’re making money off them. But that wasn’t (edit:
yourthe) message;yourthe message was, they’re hiring Nazis. It’s relevant whether they’re materially supporting the Nazis, or being materially supported by a cut of their revenue.It wasn’t my message, but it certainly made sense to me and still does. whereas your message makes sense but in a totally different way. It’s basically “nuh-uh”
Hm. Fair enough. The core complaint I have with banning Nazis from being able to speak, has nothing to do with which way the money is flowing. And I fixed “your” to be “the”; I just hadn’t noticed you weren’t the person I was talking with before.
That’s splitting hairs. Salespeople who work on commission are keeping an amount of what they make for the company, but I doubt many people would claim they aren’t being paid to sell a product.
They are being paid by subscribers, not by substack. I am not on substack’s side here, but that detail seems quite relevant if we’re interested in painting an accurate picture of what’s going on.
If they were putting Nazi content on substack and no individuals were subscribing to read it, they would be earning 0.
Substack is profiting from those same subscribers, no doubt.
They are being paid by subscribers, not by substack.
Again- If you sold widgets door-to-door for a 20% commission, would you say you were being paid by the people who buy the widgets? I doubt many would.
In that case I’d be selling something made by the entity giving me commission - what people want and pay for is something made by someone other than me. In this case the people creating the content are the same people drawing the subscribers, so it’s more accurate to say substack takes a cut of their subscription income than to say substack pays them.
If I stop selling widgets the company still has the exact same widgets and can get anyone else to sell them. If a renowned nazi writer (bleh) takes their content to another platform, substack no longer has that content (or the author’s presence on their platform) to profit from.
what people want and pay for is something made by someone other than me.
Sort of like Substack’s servers then?
You think the platform is the widget, I think the content is the widget. I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree.
“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.
Substack: Nazis are cool, but you better not be selling sex related shit! We have standards!
“We do not condone Nazi propaganda, but we are very concerned about sex work causing social degeneracy.”
Substack is likely very concerned about the purity of the volk
Condone (transitive verb): To overlook, forgive, or disregard (an offense) without protest or censure.
Neat.
Interesting, I generally think of the Merriam-Webster definition:
to regard or treat (something bad or blameworthy) as acceptable, forgivable, or harmless
Or perhaps even further than that: actually approving of something. Guess “condone” is a little weaker of a word than I thought. But its popularity calls for being extra careful of even overlooking wrongdoing.
Funny how words mean things
So substack is a pro-nazi platform run by Nazi enablers, got it.
🤦
Bring out the bad-faith arguments, lol.
If you let Nazis congregate at your bar, congratulations, it’s a Nazi bar now.
Lemme guess, the room you wrote this comment in has an Iron Cross somewhere in it.
This would be silly even if they didn’t moderate at all but they do. They don’t allow sex workers use their service. And we aren’t talking about “Nazis” as a code word for the far right. The complaint letter cited literal Nazis with swastika logos.
Plus, how grand are his delusions of grandeur if he thinks his fucking glorified email blast manager is the one true hope for free speech? Let the Nazis self-host an open source solution (like Ghost).
They don’t allow sex workers use their service.
What about a nazi sex worker ?
I guess exceptions could be made …
Do they not allow sex workers to use their service? Here’s a sex worker who posts on Substack.
I believe keeping the ability for sex workers to post there intact is a good reason not to ban Nazis – basically, deciding who are “good” posters and allowing only them leads to a steadily-expanding list of “bad” categories of people who need to get banned, with sex workers as an obvious additional early target.
If you’re open to reading an article from Reason.com expanding on this take, which I partially agree with, there it is.
(Edit: Restructured so that more of the argument comes directly from me, as opposed to Reason.com)
They don’t allow sexually explicit content. From their TOS:
We don’t allow porn or sexually exploitative content on Substack, including any depictions of sexual acts for the sole purpose of sexual gratification.
So, a porn star could write about the industry but couldn’t use it like “OnlyFans but blog” where she had a post and included some pictures for subscribers.
Which is fine. They’re the publisher. They can decide smut is a step too far. But don’t pretend to be some free speech martyr for publishing Nazi propaganda while banning showing a tit.
… which is very different from “not allowing sex workers to use their service,” and undermines the whole argument that “well they do do moderation, they just think Nazis are on the ‘ok’ list.” I would have had a totally different response if the person I was responding to had tried to argue that since they don’t allow actual porn, they should also be obligated to ban extreme viewpoints.
I’m not at all surprised that a Koch-funded publication thinks that Substack should allow Nazis to use their platform to make money.
Ad hominem. Nice. That said, I get it if you think Reason.com is a sketchy source to try to point to as an argument for anything. I restructured my message, so I’m simply stating my facts and opinions directly, so you can disagree directly if you like, instead of just jeering at the “Reason.com” part of it.
If the fact that I cited “Reason.com” as an aside is a problem, but it’s not a problem the person I was replying to was calmly stating something that was highly relevant to the argument that wasn’t actually true… you might be only concerned with whether something agrees with your biases, not whether it’s accurate. Does that not seem like a problem to you?
The Kochs are Nazis. That’s not an ad hominem, that’s just a fact.
David, along with his brother Chuck Koch continued their father’s rabid anti-communism and anti-semitism by founding and funding both the Reason Foundation and the Cato Institute. Both “think tanks” billed themselves as libertarian. Both published holocaust denial literature including the writings of school mates of the Koch brothers.
They were even partly raised by a Nazi.
Here again, you get this strange recurrence of a kind of little touch of Nazi Germany, because … Charles and Frederick, the oldest sons, were put in the hands of a German nanny who was described by other family members as just a fervid Nazi. She was so devout a supporter of Hitler that finally, after five years working for the family, she left of her own volition in 1940 when Hitler entered France because she wanted to celebrate with the Fuehrer.
And no, it doesn’t seem like a problem to me to call Nazis Nazis. Because they’re Nazis.
“Ad hominem” refers to ignoring the content of a message, and making your argument based on who is speaking. It doesn’t mean that your statement about the speaker isn’t factual, or that understanding more about who is speaking might not be relevant – it simply refers to the idea that you should at some point address the content of the message if you’re going to debate it.
In this case, I said something, you ignored the content and instead focused on the fact that I’d linked to something, and criticized the source of the thing I’d linked to. Okay, fair enough, the Koch brothers are Nazis. I don’t like them either. If you want to respond to the content of my message, I’ve now reframed it so the stuff I’m saying is coming directly from me, so that “but Reason.com!” isn’t any longer a way to dismiss it because of who is speaking.
“Ad hominem” refers to ignoring the content of a message, and making your argument based on who is speaking.
I’m aware. And that is perfectly valid when the content of the message is defending monetizing Nazis is funded by Nazis.
You missed what I’m saying. I’m not funded by Nazis. You took my message and ignored what I was saying in favor of criticizing Reason.com. Fair enough. I was inviting you to continue the conversation, if you have an argument against the content, now that I’ve removed anything that could be construed as “because Reason.com says so” and simply said what I think about it.
Nazism doesn’t deserve tolerance, any person who doesn’t punch it in the face is equal or worse.
So they are a Nazi platform. End of.
If you run a bar, and Nazis hang out in your bar, you run a Nazi bar
Almost like some old school bronze age curse. Doomed to forever open bars and family restaurants that within months become Nazi. The bar tender has a PTSD unfocused glaze as he recalls the gradually morphing of his last 11 bars.
If only there was something you could do to the Nazis to stop them showing up at your bar
Not in this version of the curse
But it’s one of their defining features - they talk a big game, but if you hit them with a bat they run away crying like the pissy little cowards they really are
Same thing goes for Zionists.
I mean yeah, but what does that have to do with anything here?
They’re all over this thread defending Substack.
So they’re Nazis
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“Let’s tolerate the people that say they want to genocide entire ethnic groups” Surely nothing bad is gonna happen /s
Yes genocide is bad, but not taking their money is worse!
Like 1930s Germany did.
Sure, the Night of the Long Knives was bad, but not having it is worse!
How?
Troll?
So the US government? Except instead of “tolerate” write “massively support and arm”
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So let me get this straight… They don’t like Nazis, but Nazis not making money is worse than Nazis making money?
Goodbye substack.
I’d love to say that, but unfortunately journalists I respect, who are doing very excellent content that repudiates fascism, don’t really have anywhere else to go. Radley Balko, for example, is a preeminent journalist on the topics of police brutality, law enforcement misdeeds, and failures of the criminal justice system. But WaPo didn’t want to publish him any more, so where does he go?
I hope they find alternatives, but I’m not going to stop paying for journalism from people like Balko. I don’t want to let white supremacists force any more epistemic closure.
In the old days, one would pay a small monthly fee and then you have your own website where you could basically do anything legal that you want. Is this no longer possible?
Still 100% possible. Wordpress hosting is cheap and easy. It’s getting harder and harder for that type of site to find a good audience, as the web becomes more and more siloed and the stuff within the silos becomes more tightly interconnected, but some notable people are still doing it. Cory Doctorow comes to mind.
Because Idividual websites would be punished by search engines they were made a part of a bigger one, can we make better search engine to go around this?
Medium?
No idea how the compensation structure works on Medium. But I also have no idea what their content moderation policies are either.
Almost as if Radley Balko’s publisher deciding whether he was allowed to continue to speak anymore was a bad thing, and giving him a place where he can do it and earn a living and no one polices his content was a good thing.
(Edit: Woo hoo hoo judging by the downvotes y’all sure don’t like it when it happens to one of your guys. Just to be clear, I don’t really care all that much what happens to the literal Nazis. I only care a lot about this issue because I suspect that once you’re done kicking off Nazis, you’ll want to kick off the Joe Rogans and the Dave Chappelles and the COVID denialists and sooner or later some person will arrive with a list on which is someone you like. Like Radley Balko. And yet, somehow, that’ll be totally different in your mind, not connected at all with the earlier people you were advocating for banning.)
