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.”
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,@xkforce@lemmy.world ?
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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Do not tolerate the intolerant.
Toleration is a social contract. Those that break the contract should not be allowed to seek protection under it.
This is such a wonderfully ironic statement. It is through toleration that they are painted in a poor light.
Tolerance is a social contract not a right. If you are tolerant, you earn tolerance for yourself. If you are intolerant, you don’t deserve tolerance yourself. It’s really not that complicated imo. I don’t feel the need to be tolerant of racist, bigoted people.
Tolerance is a social contract not a right. If you are tolerant, you earn tolerance for yourself. If you are intolerant, you don’t deserve tolerance yourself.
I’ve never heard it said that way. This is a fantastic way to put it.
This is ideal, but falls on a simple premise - everyone believes the other party is intolerant and that they are proudly righeous in behaving like a judge, jury and executioner.
Open and free critique means manipulation and grooming happens far less effectively, which neuters anything from its core. Society is the judge, but it must also be the metric it is measured against.
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Funny, I thought they hated gays too /j
I feel like you’re just being contrarian for its own sake.
The first paragraph is just plain false. Everyone believes others to be intolerant? No, the parent comment just said you be intolerant to the people who prove themselves to be intolerant? “Judge, Jury, Executioner”? Word salad. And people should judge others - we already do that, thats how we know if we can trust someone and expend the energy spend guarding against them in more useful tasks. The second paragraph is just a whole lot of words that say nothing.
Also, I’m just following your advice:
Open and free critique means manipulation and grooming happens far less effectively, which neuters anything from its core.
Be better.
You dont. You just have to be tolerant of their existence because theirr existance is protected by right and law. If you punch a Nazi your still getting charged with assault and battery. If you kill a racist your still going to jail. We dont illegalize views and ideas in america.
No you don’t have to tolerate their existence.
We fought a war against Nazis for a fucking reason.
Their ideals are shut and anyone who pushes them is worth less than the air they breath and the dirt they shit in.
The first amendment says you do in fact have to tolerate them sir. You may not commit acts of violence against them for their speech or you get put in prison. Thats the way it is.
The first amendment applies to the government’s actions. Not personal actions.
Hate speech is not a protected class so you can be refused service for it at any business,
paradox of tolerance
paradox of tolerance
From the article…
“I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.”
there is nothing worthwhile lost silencing nazi bullshit from social media
there is nothing worthwhile lost silencing nazi bullshit from social media
"… as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.”
If you don’t win the argument, the argument goes on forever.
lol imagine trying to ‘win’ an argument with an idiot instead of just mocking them for the lulz…
lol imagine trying to ‘win’ an argument with an idiot instead of just mocking them for the lulz…
It’s not about winning, or replying directly to just the troll/conflict bot.
It’s about leaving an elaboration of the initial opinion, for everyone else who comes by later to the topic and reads.
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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!
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?
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.
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
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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.
Nailed it
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.
Pressing X to doubt
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?
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.
🤡
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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Your username is disgusting.
Do you not know who Dick Tracy is?
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I like to accuse people of blocking me because I don’t understand how Lemmy works.
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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?
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.
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.
“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.
Funny how words mean things
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.
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
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.
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
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 …
Nazism doesn’t deserve tolerance, any person who doesn’t punch it in the face is equal or worse.
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.
Medium?
No idea how the compensation structure works on Medium. But I also have no idea what their content moderation policies are either.
“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?
Oh didn’t get it! Sorry for that.
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?
Nazis making money and Substack not getting a cut of it is apparently worse than Nazis making money.
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Ah, I see we’re using the SCOTUS definition of ‘free speech’ where money is speech.
It’s 2023 and we have all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips but somehow people still have no idea what free speech is…
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That’s the part that gets me. If it were just not removing content, well, I’d probably still complain but they’d have a coherent freedom of speech argument. But… they have to pay Nazis to make Nazi content and take a cut, otherwise it’s censorship and that somehow helps the Nazis?
Being a Nazi isn’t a “view.” It is a political movement guided by the principles of hate, violence, and genocide.
And they are saying they are cool with that.
