Should Substack Allow Explicit Nazis on Its Platform?
There is a debate about whether Substack should allow Nazis and others who violate Substack’s terms of service to publish hate speech and profit from it.
wrote an article for The Atlantic about Substack’s Nazi problem. (And he hasn’t expressed his opinion as to what actions he thinks Substack should take.)He was talking about self-identifying white supremacists and Nazis—not people simply who are simply being accused by their critics. He was talking about people like Richard Spencer and Edward Reid, whose bio says he writes about “the Jewish question.”
Substack’s terms of service claim it does not allow the publication of “hate,” but I guess they use that language about “incit[ing] violence” liberally. If you just host a torch-wielding neo-Nazi rally in which you instigate people to attack protesters, as Spencer did in Charlottesville, I guess they think that’s okay because the violence and all didn’t happen online.
I, for one, think that violent neo-Nazis make Substack and the world a worse place and that platforms that not only publish content but also feed it to users via its online infrastructure and indeed its own algorithms have some responsibility for what they publish and deliver. They don’t simply provide the platform; some of Substack’s features take an active approach in introducing content to readers. Where exactly we should draw the line on what constitutes hate speech is a legitimate question. But there are a number of extreme publications that Katz pointed to where the publisher themselves is openly advocating hate. They say it right in their bios in many cases.
On the other hand, such Substack users such as Elle Griffin, Freedie deBoer, and Matt Taibbi, have signed onto a letter criticizing Katz and downplaying the Nazis. Their letter, which I linked to because I am quoting from it, is vague about the actual content of the hate newsletters Substack publishes.
But just outside the walls, the rest of the internet is pressuring Substack to act more like other social media platforms. After an opinion piece was recently published in The Atlantic critiquing fringe voices on the platform, many Substack writers began calling for moderation. They want the platform to decide who can say what, and who can be here.
The Nazis and avowed white supremacists published on Substack are called “fringe voices.”
The article does mention the word “Nazi” once but only in response to a quotation from the original article on The Atlantic:
The author of the recent Atlantic piece gave one way: actively go searching for it. He admits to finding “white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi newsletters” by conducting a “search of the Substack website and of extremist Telegram channels.”
(You can debate how accurate that interpretation is. Everyone’s experience of the Notes feed may be different.)
Their defense of the presence of Nazis on Substack in the guise of standing for “free speech” is a bit hypocritical when many of them have themselves cheered on efforts to suppress free speech, efforts to censor or sue people for expressing opinions with which they disagree.
Twitter, who Taibbi worked with to publicize select excerpts of emails and messages Elon Musk pushed to him, is suing Media Matters for publishing a report about how Twitter was publishing advertisements next to neo-Nazi messages, a report which Twitter has not actually disputed the veracity of.
What public service is being upheld by having Richard Spencer tell us his opinion about Taylor Swift or having him tell us his opinion about why the U.S. military should capture Haitians and force them into slavery? I can’t think of any. Let the people arguing for Spencer’s inclusion on Substack to make their case.
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