More than 200 Substack authors asked the platform to explain why itâs âplatforming and monetizing Nazis,â and now they have an answer straight from co-founder Hamish McKenzie:
I just want to make it clear that we donât like Nazis eitherâwe wish no-one held those views. But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we donât think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go awayâin fact, it makes it worse.
While McKenzie offers no evidence to back these ideas, this tracks with the companyâs 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. âWeâre not going to get into specific âwould you or wonât youâ content moderation questionsâ 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 âwe donât like or condone bigotry in any form.â
Thank you for your detailed reply, again.
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 youâre not going to buy Tide until thatâs remedied is a boycott.
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 âHolocaust is a lie check out these posts [nazi propaganda link 1, 2, 3]â post up is a hazard. Many more people read forums than contribute, typically.
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 âWe are not going to debate if gay people have rightsâ rule. Someone might want to make an argument that they donât, but the belief that they do is so axiomatic for the locale itâs not worth entertaining the âdebateâ. 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 itâs 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 thatâs spherical friction-less cow levels removed from my lived experience. Maybe Iâve just been lucky where Iâve 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 arenât great.)
So we disagree on this point. I donât see any good coming from platforming holocaust deniers or homophobes or whatever. If Iâm running a bar, I donât need to let the nazis have their meetup in the back booth. Thatâs just going to draw more nazis, and probably scare off the regular people. Likewise, if Iâm running a forum, I donât need to let them have their little soapbox in my figurative bar.
Iâve also never run a forum. I expect thereâs a big âfor me it was tuesdayâ experience. For the guy who wants to debate if queer couples really need to get married, itâs the first time heâs ever waded into this topic. For the moderation team, itâs 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 anyoneâs idealism.
This sub-thread is very long and Iâm starting to lose focus. I donât think we agree on everything, but I appreciate that youâve been civil.
Haha yeah, all good. I enjoyed it, thank you as well. Iâll wrap up my thoughts if you donât want to go back and forth indefinitely.
It comes down to the goal of the boycott. A boycott to stop someone polluting or abusing human rights, Iâm down for. A boycott because some comedian said something someone doesnât like and they want to âdeplatformâ him, Iâm against. A boycott because Substack allows Nazis, and youâre trying to get third parties to punish Substack to make them stop, I also donât like.
Somewhat related, I think itâs great to attack Nazis directly. Something like this where youâre crippling them because they broke the law and hurt people, Iâm very in favor of. I donât like Nazis any more than anyone else does. I just think it has to be based on behavior rather than speech. Letting them speak, but not letting them hurt people, I think is going to hinder their cause a lot more than it helps it.
Okay, hereâs the crux:
I donât think that post is a hazard.
I think having an exchange of ideas which includes dangerous ones, even very dangerous ones, alongside the truth, is a good thing. I think trying to get rid of âdangerousâ ideas by banning people from talking about them does more harm than good. I think declaring that no one is allowed to say the holocaust is a lie is a hazard. I think it helps the Nazis to make that rule. I think the people who want to ban Nazis are, unintentionally, helping the Nazis quite a lot. People are talking to me in this subthread like Iâm being soft on the Nazis and Nazis are terrible, but I think letting them say what they think, having everyone see it, and having other people free to illustrate why theyâre wrong, is way harder on the Nazis than forcing them off somewhere where they can congregate in peace and no one can see them.
You might not agree, but thatâs how I see it.
Yeah, I get this. I wouldnât try to tell anyone running a forum that they have to entertain this type of debate, because itâs incredibly draining and may not fit the goal of the forum and may obscure the actual goal of the forum. I get all that and I wouldnât try to tell you to run your forum any other way.
The thing is though, that âfor me it was Tuesdayâ thing cuts both ways. You may have had this discussion a thousand times already, but for the guy that came in, it may be his very first time being exposed to certain things. I think a lot of religious people have this type of experience when they start talking with athiest people on the internet, and they may be coming from a pretty ignorant place when they start out. I had this type of experience as far as geopolitics and who the âgood guysâ are. And, Iâve heard a former white supremacist talking about having his awakening moment and leaving the KKK because of it.
The âtalk.originsâ newgroup on Usenet was this. It was a place to debate evolution versus creationism. Is that a pretty firmly settled question? Yes. Absolutely it is. Honestly, more so than gay rights (although gay rights is also settled, to me.) And yet, somehow, there are people in the world who donât agree. A lot of them argue in bad faith, a lot of them are tedious or ignorant, thereâs a ton of ground that gets covered over and over and over again. But is that a useful thing to have exist? Ab so fuckin lutely.
Does that mean that every 4chan troll arguing about the holocaust in bad faith, whoâs never going to change his mind, deserves your time and attention? On a forum thatâs not for that? Fuck no. I actually think that deliberate engineered misinformation, and the toxic and mind-change-resistant culture of debate on the modern internet, argues for a radical rethinking of whatâs a sensible way to approach âan open exchange of communicationâ so that it doesnât wind up as just the Nazis being able to spew hatred in places it doesnât belong, and public forums being soft fertile ground for disinformation pipelines. Iâve also debated with enough closed minded people on the internet that Iâm not naive about what the result of engaging with Nazis in an earnest debate is likely to be. But, a lot of the creationists on talk.origins were just as bad-faith about their conduct as modern 4chan trolls.
Hopefully that makes sense. I just donât think that the answer is that as soon as someone says one ignorant thing about, for example, gay rights, theyâre stripped of their ability to continue the conversation. Because if no one is ever willing to talk with them about it except other gay-bashers, how would you expect they would ever change their mind about it?