bar fights and punching nazis

Substackers Against Nazis

Summer Solstice Card

About a year ago I was looking for a place to blog some thoughts in order to think aloud. After considering boosting my old domain to use something like wordpress or other blogging / content backend, and considering how I so enjoyed blogging on blogspot before it was bought by google in February 2003 (21 years ago soon), I looked around for a platform, like at medium.com etc, but circled back here, trialling substack. Mostly because there were a few writers I liked on it. No other reason. The monetisation is the least interesting to me.

Blogging is not what is was in the early 2000s. It got captured by social media that decade and destroyed.

In any case I just thought it might be better getting it out there, than jotting words down, in a notebook (which I still do) or on my harddrive/cloud (which I still do). The routine, which was only going to be one per week, was to help do this. As it is I do at least two posts per week.

Over Christmas I will look over more sustainable places/platforms. And will probably seriously go to some my-own.domain hosted thing at some stage. This was Plan A at some stage.

This site will be maintained as a back-up.

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The following quotes from other substack is part of why I’ll be heading to my own domain, and so other engine.

Will the blogroll return? I wonder.

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Here are what others are saying about nazis on substack

The first is the ongoing rumble of disagreement about the platform’s approach to content moderation, which is to say, next to nothing, and about the extent to which the platform hosts or supports far right, white supremacist or fascist newsletters. Jonathan Katz’ article in the Atlantic was the major stimulus for this latest round of discussion but in some form or another it’s been a perennial issue, especially since the platform chose to promote the work of Richard Hanania.

I’m as annoyed as Katz and many other Substack writers by the complete silence of Substack’s management team about that profile but I am not surprised by it. Substack’s owners are like every other Big Tech management team in several ways. Most notably, they’re prone to dressing up decisions that are dictated by their business model and their own social affiliations as generalized stands on principle. They’re not as unhinged as Elon Musk about it, or as weaselly as Mark Zuckerberg, but they’re speaking from the same rough foundations.

What they say is that they’re dedicated to free speech and to building better conversations across political and social divides. They particularly do not sincerely mean the latter because the platform is (I think quite deliberately) mostly invisible to scrutiny by both outside observers and its own writers. It’s extremely difficult to browse the totality of the platform or build any comprehensive model of what is hosted on it. The only way you could begin to do so would be via a version of snowball sampling, e.g., to find a newsletter that wasn’t in your existing network via Notes or via some other discovery tool, then subscribe to all of its recommended newsletters, and just keep doing that until you had compiled a list of many hundreds of publications. Some of them you wouldn’t be able to read without paying, but most of them you’d at least be able get a sense of what they wrote about and what their typical readers were like.

I don’t actually blame Substack for making it hard to easily wander out of your own discursive neighborhood. While many of us worry about the “echo chamber” of social media, the fact is that even if you do believe in bravely debating or building bridges to your ideological opposites, public culture—especially social media—isn’t the right place to do it. The platforms that have trained a generation within particular algorithmic structures have cultivated ‘hot’ discourses of enmity and contempt, and it’s rarely clear whether you’re talking to a real and locatable person with genuine convictions or some kind of troll or manipulator who is trying to shift the nature of acceptable discourse. Or an “influencer” who is just offering to be whatever the paying customers want them to be.

Substack’s writers and the readers of newsletters on the platform should be clear, though. It’s difficult to discover the full range of what’s on the platform because the owners don’t want to spend any money at all on content moderation. They know that even a minimal investment in that direction can get very expensive very quickly. The only current platform that has succeeded in having something like community standards is Reddit, and that’s by cultivating a massive operation of volunteer moderators—an achievement that the current CEO of Reddit seems determined to destroy.

And Now A Word About Your Sponsor

So below, I reproduce a collective letter entitled “Substackers Against Nazis”. I am a now a signatory. But as is often the case, I have a “yes but…” that amounts to a third letter. (The first letter floating around Substack argues more or less that Substack should do absolutely nothing about any newsletter published on its platform besides provide tools for individual authors to block individual commenters or readers from their newsletters and to block newsletters from view that they don’t want to see on Notes, because free speech.)

My third letter is more like a footnote to the Against Nazis letter, which you can read below, but these are points that are important to me personally, that informed a recent column I wrote here on these issues. They extend beyond Substack itself.

Substack: Any Club That Would Have Me As a Member

But there are others here who are far worse. There are several white supremacists and even neo-Nazis who have newsletters here, including, for example Richard Spencer — feel free to read about him if you don’t know who he is.

You may be familiar with the “Nazi Bar” story: if you own a bar and let a Nazi drink there, they invite their friends, and pretty soon you’re running a Nazi bar. The best thing to do is kick them out on sight.

Substack is in a chillingly similar position. An article was recently published in The Atlantic by Jonathan M. Katz about this that is well worth your time reading (the link goes to a free version hosted on MSN), and Katz has written a follow-up on his own newsletter (and another as well).

Substackers Against Nazis

The letter : Substackers Against Nazis

SA collective letter to Substack leadership

Hi readers—Below is a letter to the Substack founders that I helped draft as part of a group of publishers seeking answers to questions about the platforming and monetizing of Nazis. We are all publishing the letter on our own individual Substacks today for visibility, and to make our readers aware of our asks and concerns. Thanks for reading. 

Dear Chris, Hamish & Jairaj:

We’re asking a very simple question that has somehow been made complicated: Why are you platforming and monetizing Nazis? 

According to a piece written by Substack publisher Jonathan M. Katz and published by The Atlantic on November 28, this platform has a Nazi problem: 

“Some Substack newsletters by Nazis and white nationalists have thousands or tens of thousands of subscribers, making the platform a new and valuable tool for creating mailing lists for the far right. And many accept paid subscriptions through Substack, seemingly flouting terms of service that ban attempts to ‘publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes’...Substack, which takes a 10 percent cut of subscription revenue, makes money when readers pay for Nazi newsletters.”

As Patrick Casey, a leader of a now-defunct neo-Nazi group who is banned on nearly every other social platform except Substack, wrote on here in 2021: “I’m able to live comfortably doing something I find enjoyable and fulfilling. The cause isn’t going anywhere.” Several Nazis and white supremacists including Richard Spencer not only have paid subscriptions turned on but have received Substack “Bestseller” badges, indicating that they are making at a minimum thousands of dollars a year.

From our perspective as Substack publishers, it is unfathomable that someone with a swastika avatar, who writes about “The Jewish question,” or who promotes Great Replacement Theory, could be given the tools to succeed on your platform. And yet you’ve been unable to adequately explain your position. 

In the past you have defended your decision to platform bigotry by saying you “make decisions based on principles not PR” and “will stick to our hands-off approach to content moderation.” But there’s a difference between a hands-off approach and putting your thumb on the scale. We know you moderate some content, including spam sites and newsletters written by sex workers. Why do you choose to promote and allow the monetization of sites that traffic in white nationalism? 

Your unwillingness to play by your own rules on this issue has already led to the announced departures of several prominent Substackers, including Rusty Foster and Helena Fitzgerald. They follow previous exoduses of writers, including Substack Pro recipient Grace Lavery and Jude Ellison S. Doyle, who left with similar concerns. 

As journalist Casey Newton told his more than 166,000 Substack subscribers after Katz’s piece came out: “The correct number of newsletters using Nazi symbols that you host and profit from on your platform is zero.” 

We, your publishers, want to hear from you on the official Substack newsletter. Is platforming Nazis part of your vision of success? Let us know—from there we can each decide if this is still where we want to be.

Signed, 

Substackers Against Nazis

Thanks for reading. If this letter resonates, please share this post with others. If you’re a publisher who would like to join this collective effort, we encourage you to repost the letter on your own Substack.