Substack says it will not remove or demonetize Nazi content

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.)
- 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?
  
  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.
  
  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.
- 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.
  
  There are some things not worth listening to. Not all opinions are created equal.
  
  Nazi lives don't matter.
  
  Agreed. However, providing a platform for hate speech is no different than condoning it.
  
  Zero tolerance for nazis. Zero.
  
  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.
  
  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.

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.
- 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.
  
  paradox of tolerance

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?

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).
  
  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.

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.

“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."
- 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

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.
  
  I'm not at all surprised that a Koch-funded publication thinks that Substack should allow Nazis to use their platform to make money.

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.
  
  Same thing goes for Zionists.

Nazism doesn't deserve tolerance, any person who doesn't punch it in the face is equal or worse.
- Agreed. Unfortunate that many times this is met with some smug shit about "wanting echo chambers"
  Not wanting a feed full of modern phrenology and a 20 page analysis about how this weeks 13 year old black kid getting murdered by the cops for looking at them wrong is "totally fine and actually should happen more" does NOT mean I "want echo chambers"
- What about my friend No-Arms Norman? All he can do is kick a Nazi in the ass!
  
  Not true! Norman can also kick the teeth out of those fucking nazi mouths!
  
  But can he kick a nazi so hard in the balls he tore a tendon in his foot?
- Funny how a country that really experienced Nazis feels about this sort of stuff.
- Fists aren't a cure to intolerance. Probably doesn't hurt so knock ~~yourself~~ a nazi out. As long as force isn't being used to prevent open discussion and debate, it would be most unwise to drive dangerous ideologies underground where they can't be monitored and understood.
  
  You should read the tolerance paradox, to understand why you shouldn't be tolerant to intolerant people.
  Why would someone would know myself? you idiot? I am not nazy or plan to tolerate them.
  Those ideologies should be put in the mud where they belong, it is good to read history to understand why they are bad, and only stupid untolerant and racists edgelords are the ones that think that being nazi is cool.
  Lol, you think you can monitor and understand those? lol. Just look how dangerous racist idiots are, for example the maga, who tried to overturn the election, in an attempt to inssurection, all of those idiots are traitors, and if they want to say that it is not that bad, then they are also as stupid as those inssurectionits.

So they're Nazis

"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!
- So the US government? Except instead of "tolerate" write "massively support and arm"

So let me get this straight... They don't like Nazis, but Nazis not making money is worse than Nazis making money?
- No, people writing about sexy stuff and getting paid is worse than Nazis making money.
  Edit: Being fair, the bible thumpers of old who established all the laws/morals which underlie most of the regulations today would take a big big problem with people writing sexy stuff. Nazis hating Jews would not be a big problem for them.
  
  Anything related to sex or women's sexuality that's very bad.
  Letting Nazi's spread their hate, that's good.
  Says every social media, internet company ever.
- Nazis making money and Substack not getting a cut of it is apparently worse than Nazis making money.
- 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?
- They are taking a free-speech approach, I suppose.
  
  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…

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.

Tolerating Naziism and allowing it to use social tools to spread its hate is what makes it worse.
- Teach critical thinking skills as a pillar of the school curriculum and the population will be immunized preventing the spread.
  
  And teach the value of everyone being equal and their human rights, in school and at home, where it matters (both).

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?
  
  Medium?
  
  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.)

We already knew that SS liked Nazis.
All joking aside, silencing Nazis and deplatforming them is LITERALLY fighting against them. How is allowing them to make money and market themselves on your platform doing anything to stem the tide of Nazism? Obviously they're playing culture war games and saying they're not.
- Yeah, people don't seem to realize how insidious this shit is. Unfettered capitalism is allowing these fuckers to gain credibility and giving them a soapbox under the guise of "free speech."
  The desire for profit above all else, combined with the fact that the last of the people alive during (and old enough to understand) WW2 dying off, has been allowing fascism to wrap its filthy tendrils around our society once again. Preventing these people from taking power needs to be our priority, but unfortunately, constantly having to fight against this shit impedes all other progress.
  Free speech is not absolute. Fascists (and particularly ones that call themselves Nazis) have no place in modern society, and they should be given no quarter because we've seen what happens if we don't root them out.
  This is not just a disagreement on policy, or a mere difference of opinion. These people literally want my friends dead.
  
  Nazism isn't an ideology, is a direct threat of violence. Anyone around a Nazi has a right to self defense rooted in natural law. That's why is fine to punch Nazis.

McKenzie followed up later with a similar statement to the one today, saying “we don’t like or condone bigotry in any form.
Condone:
verb accept and allow (behavior that is considered morally wrong or offensive) to continue
- coded language for "we think Nazis have a point"

"We don't like or condone bigotry in any form."
...But we are happy to financially support bigotry and directly profit from it.
- “Free speech” relates only to the government. What you say makes no sense.

Facebook just shrugs off the rampant white supremacist content on its platform with great success, you can literally put up a profile photo with an "It's OK to be white" frame, or "white power" supplied by Facebook. I guess Substack thinks that if it works for Facebook it should be fine for them.
Incidentally Reddit banned me for posting pictures of Nazis on r/beholdthemasterrace, a subreddit for mocking white supremacy, when some Nazis went and complained to Reddit admins I was doing it. Reddit also sides with Nazis, they're just quieter about it.
- You probably got banned by reddit because other subreddits will nail you with bots for just posting to certain subs regardless of the context.
  
  No, I saw one of the Nazis I posted talking on Facebook about how he had reported me to Reddit admins. Well then don't have a swastika face tattoo.
- White powder 🌨️
- Is there some specific background to "it's okay to be white"? Without any context it does not sound obviously " white supremacist related to me, but it could be cultural, language or other.
  
  It's a Nazi talking point, one of their tropes is that white people are being eradicated everywhere because of multiculturalism and diversity, and that people are being taught it's not ok to just be white. The slogan originated from 4chan trolling but Nazis have absolutely adopted it.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_okay_to_be_white

Okay fine, I'm never clicking on a substack link again.
And after say a grace period of about 6 months to move elsewhere, I'm going to assume anyone associating with the service is at best a nazi sympathiser
Go ahead, be a Nazi bar, I'm sure their money is worth it
- This is such a complicated feeling... On one hand, I agree. But on the other, we can't specifically pinpoint what censorship is valid and what isn't.
  Edit: Obviously, I'm not considering Nazis in this thought experiment.
  Edit 2: OH MY GOD PEOPLE! OF FUCKING COURSE WE SHOULD KEEP NAZIS OUT FFS! 😑
  
  look i mean, wherever the line is, im pretty confident nazis are on the other side of it
  
  But on the other, we can’t specifically pinpoint what censorship is valid and what isn’t.
  Yes we can. Kicking Nazis off their platform is valid censorship. Nazis lost the right to have a seat at the table in 1945.
  
  It's indeed very difficult if not impossible to exactly and specifically pinpoint where the line is, it is however extremely easy to see when ideologies and behavior steps across it.
  
  If you're still hand wringing over whether or not Nazis are scum of the Earth that deserve nothing more than pure vitriol and ostracisation, you might be a Nazi.
  
  But on the other, we can’t specifically pinpoint what censorship is valid and what isn’t.
  I've seen this come up a few times. My response has been "luckily our platforms aren't run by an inscrutable god-machine nor an evil genie".
  For non government cases like this, we don't need to solve the general case. We can just say "no Nazis allowed", and "no hating on queer folks " and so on as needed. Web forums have had rules for more than 30 years and it hasn't been a crisis.
  
  It is only censorship when it is the government, else it is normal people not wanting to deal with Nazis.
  If you really want your white supremacists views out there just roll your own setup

Is substack used in the EU? They might want to rethink their stance then...
- EU will start screaming at Substack for failure to filter out hate speech.
  
  In four years when the EU gets to it
- Nope, as far as I know only a couple of countries has explict laws againt Nazi (Germany obviously and Italy to some extend).
  But in the end it will be the person to be persecuted if any crime is committed, not the medium.
  Nobody in Italy think to punish or boycott a company just because the mafia is using and paying the company's products or services.
  
  Nope. Platforms have a responsibility to not host hate-speech and other illegal content, eg. remove it. Failure to do so is prosecutable.

What does Substack plan to do with the profits that it makes from hosting Nazi content?
- Advertise in hopes of luring in more of that sweet sweet nation fascism money.
- I'm just guessing here, but those Swiss bankers are still as fond of hiding nazis' ill-gotten gains for them as ever...

On one hand, Substack is in it's rights and as a journalistic organization, they are in the right.
The issue is: Once you serve a Nazi in your bar, you become a Nazi bar. This is no longer a marginalized viewpoint you can ignore. Its actively recruiting and frightening. Inaction is enabling. Substack is going to become shitty, and fast. They will lose high engagement users, first when the ones who protested pile out for another platform and then quickly when the quality dips.
Also, their cavalier attitude will change when Stripe steps in.
- You can contact Stripe at the link to let them know about the company they are associating with.
- How is Stripe associated with Substack? (I'm out of the loop here)
  
  I an guessing they do their payment processingt
  
  I was too, but sounds like the TL;DR is they're the supporting infrastructure which substack uses:
  Substack’s team built its service on Stripe’s infrastructure, which bypassed significant investment in engineering. By leaning on Stripe’s expertise, Substack could scale quickly and focus its energy on fulfilling its promise to writers. The company offers better services because it can continue to lean on Stripe and direct extra bandwidth toward customers.
  https://stripe.com/ae/customers/substack
- The issue is: Once you serve a Nazi in your bar, you become a Nazi bar.
  So if a Nazi buy [a service] then the [service offerer] is a Nazi.
  So every [service offerer] in the world is probably Nazi, since probably every [service offerer] in the world has at least a Nazi customer.
  Interesting approach, now what we should do about all these Nazi [service offerer] ?
  
  the context of the post is about knowingly serving nazis. this argument does not work in that context.

So they have no rules, any content is acceptable?
Anything less is "censorship" after all
- They probably have to follow laws and that's it.
  Seems like fine platform, imo. Just let people communicate with the same amount of freedom they would have in real life.
  
  In real life, a restaurant can and will kick you out and ban you from the premises for wearing a swastika and saying you think minorities don't deserve to live.
  Ergo, being kicked off a company's privately owned server for hate speech is EXACTLY the same amount of freedom they would have in real life.
  Everyone loves censorship. Even you.
  
  The same amount of freedom, but a much easier job to make money off of your bigotry! A site not afraid to help Nazis earn money! Sounds like a fine platform!
  
  Watch when the school shoot manifestors pop up, people post lists of addresses and names of minority groups, coordinated grey-legal attacks come from it. Plus of course the piracy, the kiddie porn, the revenge porn, the scams and grifts, the Russian misinformation.

this is enablement

No, it does not “make it worse”.
In fact, stamping out dissent and controlling people is incredibly effective. Ask any dictator.
Control is effective and necessary when it comes to people actively trying to damage society. No, I’m not supporting dictatorship or authoritarianism, just pointing out that control is effective.
Being a sect of destructive assholes doesn’t mean you should get a platform.
- “I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
  ― Elie Wiesel

Mckenzie needs to read that Reddit story about the bartender who kicked out a guy with the Third Reich eagle ensign on his shirt despite him quietly minding his own business. I really don't want Substack to "suddenly become a Nazi bar." I'm just a reader, but if I ever start a newsletter I may reconsider my platform. I am on a basic free plan for all Substack channels I read. I've thought about upgrading my subscription to some, but now I will hesitate.
- I'm guessing this story makes it "too late." If I were a Nazi (I'm not) , I'd instantly flock to any sight that welcomed me.
- Link to story?
  
  noticed that the story is now being summarized in dictionaries, haha
  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar
  
  https://www.reddit.com/r/TalesFromYourServer/comments/hsiisw/kicking_a_nazi_out_as_soon_as_they_walk_in/
- Yeah well I'm unsubscribing and deleting bookmarks. I have enough stuff to read anyway

What a stupid argument. Imagine replacing "nazis" with "pedophiles" in her answer
- Many Nazis were pedophiles.
  
  And they still are too. In fact for a few weeks I thought "let's go Brandon" was a coded pedophile thing because there's three sex offenders listed in the center of town and all three of them had "let's go Brandon" signs for months. I was like "geeze these kid fuckers are organizing a sign campaign, and who the fuck is Brandon?"
  
  Huh, I didn't know that but I'm not surprised. Morally bankrupt (or straight up evil) people doing morally wrong stuff...
- Not that yours is so much better. Imagine replacing "nazis" with "pro-choice", still sure the platform should remove the contents ?
  
  Pro-choice content isn't an incitement to violence. I'm not going to pretend being pro-choice is equivalent in any sense to being a Nazi just because some people are too stupid to see the difference.
  
  A lot of the time people have this conversation from the perspective of the person who has no horse in the race. They aren't a Nazi, nor are a target of Nazis. It ignores the people who are effected.
  Imagine you are in a space and someone posts a death threat targeting you. Others rally around that as any censorship is bad censorship. Every time you use that space you get a reminder of how someone particularly wants you dead. Now imagine that becomes just a regular part of your day. Over and over and over again you are exposed to people smugly calling you less than human, a threat to society, a moraless degenerate. You get this nice cold shock whenever you see it and get to remember how vulnerable you are, how gleeful these calls to take your rights away for something you never opted into and can't opt out of... And you are expected to take whatever anxiety is sown in you as just normal. That burden of people gleefully discussing your death just gets to be a part of your everyday. To others looking at you dealing with that burden it is treated as tolerable level of permanent unhappiness. It's simply not supposed to be other people's problem. You may not ask for assistance with managing those burdens because the cost of societies "tolerance" for speech has decided that you must personally pay for everyone's unrestricted discourse.
  Then there's the other half. Say I create a platform. Maybe I am running a print shop. I maintain it, run it, and think that I am doing society a service for facilitating a means to communicate. I find out someone has been printing death threats at my shop. Maybe they are even death threats towards someone I know. How would I feel knowing someone is taking the resources I manage, using the infrastructure I maintain to specifically terrorize someone? This person printing these death threats made ME complicit in spreading their death threat so that someone in the above example gets to feel unsafe as they go about their day. In fact, spreading death threats is a crime. Should I not be allowed to refuse to take their business?
  We as a society have the ability to differentiate between death threats and other political discourse. Calling for a genocide of a group of people - is a death threat. It may not be directed at a singular person but lemme tell you when you are the target it feels like it might as well be calling on you by name. There is no moderation policy, even an unrestricted one, that is truly ethically neutral. Your choices about what is or isn't allowed on your watch always effects people and the mental cost is borne by someone.
  
  Your analogy is false but yes if you are pro-forced birth you should not profit from pro-choice groups. Personal integrity is important and while I very much don't agree with the forced birth crowd I am willing to pretend that some of them are sincere.
  
  I feel like you feel this is a clever gotcha, but I don't follow.
  If substack (or most any private platform) decided not to host any pro-choice content, many people would probably say that's a shit move. Some anti-abortion people might support it, maybe. What's your point?
  You shouldn't evaluate the situation with a naive "did they remove content? Any content at all?" metric. You need to consider what was removed and why.
  It's also important to remember we're not talking about the government silencing or compelling speech. We're talking about private parties moderating their platform. It's important that they retain the legal right to choose what to say. And then the public can jeer and refuse to associate with them if they use their rights badly.

Money is the only vote that matters. Avoid the Nazi bar. Don't give them ad revenue or search engine relevance (for what that's worth anymore).

Another day of thanking ~~god~~ the devs for the decentralized Fediverse and Lemmy 🙏😔
- You and me both. Fuck Substack and fuck Nazis.

Here's a Wired article featuring four good alternatives to Substack.
- Ha, one of the alternatives is Revue by Twitter for their platform, which I thought had been discontinued (article is dated 2022). But button seems to be a promising alternative that they describe.
  
  Yeah, Buttondown seem great. They can migrate you from Substack so people don't even need to re-subscribe which is pretty cool. They're also active on Mastodon and just added anti-Nazi terms to their ToS. They seem pretty responsive to the community in terms of adding suggested features.

Free speech POV aside, Substack is running a business as a publisher of content. They sell advertising space. You know what de values your advertising space? Unsafe hateful content. Advertisers care about "brand safety" in terms of what their ads appear next to. You can't run a good advertising sales business if the advertisers don't have guarantees on brand safety.
- If you ever see it go ahead and screenshot it then email it them while CC some local news source. Hey, how do you feeling your roofing business being affiliated with this?
- I mean even if it made them more money to platform confirmed shitheads, it's still the wrong thing to do. Like ethically. It doesn't also have to be wrong from a business or even legal perspective.
  If a company can't take that kind of stand I don't want anything to do with them.
  I am actually kind of thrilled that I have substack subscriptions, including paid, that I can pull as my little protest to this platform. Luckily my paid subscriptions have both confirmed that they're ditching substack as well, so my support will follow them wherever they land.
  I really hope that substack lets writers have access to their email lists, so they can easily take them with them.

This is plainly irresponsible.

TIL that Substack is apparently a bunch of crypto-fascists who expect people to believe they don't support Nazis, they just give them money and a place at their table to talk about it.

Tell me you are a fascist WO telling me you are a fascist.. 🤣🤣..

And then people wonder why we're so scared of Facebook if the fediverse is "supposed to be open".
The answer is literally in front of you, people!

Gen Z needs to understand the historical lesson that the Blues Brothers taught those before them. Illinois Nazis exist, and some days they demonstrate, as per their right to freedom of speech - but this is as much as an opportunity to humiliate them and openly critique the mindset as anyone else. Dark little underground communities flourish behind closed doors.
- Yeah. I feel like we see this shift in the ACLU. They used to represent some disgusting clients in order to fight for constitutional rights. Now a days the ACLU seems to struggle with protecting constitutional rights for the sake of constitutional rights, and instead is trying to do more politically liberal focused issues.
- Shining daylight onto them does not mean monetizing a platform for them.

Translated: McKenzie just wants the sweet money and is trying to gaslight us into thinking platforming nazis is ok.

This tracks with my previous attempts at reporting that Sinfest guy. Posts hundreds of comics that blatantly break multiple official substack content guidelines and I get the effective equivalent of a promise for "action" combined with a dismissive eye roll. They completely ignored my follow-up email detailing the complete lack of action and the dozen or so new content guideline violations.

“Yeah they’re nazis but hey, they bring the money in. Why should I ban them?”
- what''s "hey" for?
  
  "but hey" is a colloquial conjunction phrase in American English. It's usually used to indicate that the previous clause had a valid concern or made a good point, but the speaker is choosing to make light of it in order to disregard it despite knowing better, because they shortsightedly want the outcome described in the clause that follows.
  Another example: "My doctor told me to watch my weight, but hey, it's Christmas and those cookies look fantastic."

Jesus Christ censorship has become such a meaningless word now.
- Yeps. It went from government actions to some company not wanting a Nazi troll.

we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.
Happy Opposite Day, everyone! 🥳

I see literalnazis.com is available for cheap if anybody want to 302 that to substack.
- Why just temporarily, go full 301.
  
  Optimism.

Only thing I can recommend is finding their advertisers and letting them know what they're advertising on

If a Nazi has a large subscription following than Substack would be directly profiting from Nazi content.

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.
Are Musky and Hamish McKenzie’s friends because that sound like the same bullshit he would say. Also, hasn't deplatforming actually been shown to work?
- It's the only thing that works. Shouting Nazis into silence is the best early way to deal with them. Show up to protest in huge numbers, deplatform them, force them to scurry back into the shadows.
  Most importantly of all, keep them from recruiting more.
  Once these efforts fail, all you're left with is violence, and violence will come, because the Nazis love it.

I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views.
"But we'll gladly host those views on our platform, run ads alongside them, and profit from them."

Cool... so they now facilitate and directly benefit from Nazi activity. Sounds great when you put it like that.

Have fun watching your website devolve into 4chan levels of degeneracy.

For anyone who remembers the interview the CEO did with the Verge back when they launched Notes, this isn't surprising at all.
You can see a transcript here. The relevant section can be found by searching all brown people are animals or more specifically just animals and reading on from there.
I'm not sure if the video footage of the interview is still available, but it's even worse because you can see that the CEO is completely lost when talking about the idea of moderating anything and basically shuts down because they have nothing to say all while the interview is politely berating them about how they're obviously failing a litmus test.
Do note that above the point where "animals" occurs is some post-hoc context provided by the interviewer (perhaps why the video is no longer easily available?) where they point out that the question they asked and the response they got wasn't exactly as extreme as it first appeared. But they also point out that it's still very notable despite the slightly mitigating correction and I'd agree entirely, especially if you watch(ed) the video and clocked the CEO's demeanor and lack of any intelligent thought on the issue.
- Oh yeah that's the classic. The interviewer describes himself as one of the targets, even, and that still doesn't make it real for this fuck.
  
  Yea I’m guessing it’s pretty obvious that it’s simply their shameless business model or they’ve made promises to someone in exchange for money to platform Nazis in the name of free speech.

This is the first time I heard of the platform and I intend to keep it that way

I want them to explain how it makes things worse.
- "We would make less money, and that's worse than more money."

Submitted for good faith discussion: Substack shouldn’t decide what we read. The reason it caught my attention is that it's co-signed by Edward Snowden and Richard Dawkins, who evidently both have blogs there I never knew about.
I'm not sure how many of the people who decide to comment on these stories actually read up about them first, but I did, such as by actually reading the Atlantic article linked. I would personally feel very uncomfortable about voluntarily sharing a space with someone who unironically writes a post called "Vaccines Are Jew Witchcraftery". However, the Atlantic article also notes:
Experts on extremist communication, such Whitney Phillips, the University of Oregon journalism professor, caution that simply banning hate groups from a platform—even if sometimes necessary from a business standpoint—can end up redounding to the extremists’ benefit by making them seem like victims of an overweening censorship regime. “It feeds into this narrative of liberal censorship of conservatives,” Phillips told me, “even if the views in question are really extreme.”
Structurally this is where a comment would usually have a conclusion to reinforce a position, but I don't personally know what I support doing here.
- IDGAF if it feeds into the narrative. It also shuts down a recruitment pipeline. It reduces their reach. It makes the next generation less likely to continue the ideology. De-platforming is a powerful tool that should be reserved for only the most crucial fights, but the fight against Nazi is one of those fights.
  The Nazis were already full-blown conspiracy theorists. EVERYTHING is spun to feed into their narrative. That ship has sailed.
  A platform operator needs to AT MINIMUM demonetize the content and censure it, and is likely only being responsible if they ban it outright. If you aren't prepared to wade into the fraught, complex world of content moderation, don't run a content platform.