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Comment by dmurray | Hacker News Reader

> they say they are "anti-censorship" and won't evict writers from their "private platform"

"Anti-censorship" is hugely unpopular with the mainstream intellectual community these days. It's close to being a dog whistle for the alt-right. I'm surprised this is a stance that would attract more "excellent writers".

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People are pushing many indepedent flavors of "anti-censorship" at the moment. Some of them clearly are dog whistle's for the alt-right by people who just want to say bigoted things without repercussions. The Substack version is more inline with the neoliberal complaints of censorship. This letter from Harper's Magazine[1] from a couple years back is a great example of this thinking. Whether the signees of this letter are "excellent writers" is certainly up for debate, but most of these clearly aren't alt-right thinkers.

[1] - https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/

It's not surprising if you think the non-mainstream intellectual community is large enough to contain excellent writers that were currently under-utilized and under-financed.

Excellent writers could have been ignored by the mainstream market previously if they were outside of the norm and sometimes found in baskets with bad apples (e.g. "alt-right"). The non-mainstream is actually a collection of smaller minority groups -- it tends to be the mainstream that is more homogenous. It doesn't surprise me that Substack has found success by not treating the non-mainstream as equally worthy of scorn.

It also won't surprise me when they start to attract more writers from the mainstream. The mainstream can sometimes appear to be totally homogenous in their hatred of liberal content policies but this is mostly due to the efforts of a small minority. If the offering is good, others will slowly come aboard.

As another commentator noted (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31084791), Substack's policy is politically more in line with neoliberal complaints of censorship than the complaints from those in the alt-right. (Their comment is better than mine since it is a more direct response to the core of your comment, which could be read as suggesting that use of Substack points towards sympathy for the "alt-right".)

> "Anti-censorship" is hugely unpopular with the mainstream intellectual community these days.

I'd disagree. It's unpopular with left-leaning mainstream audiences, but among intellectuals who write for a living, I imagine that extra assurances of not getting kicked off the platform are rather attractive.

>It's unpopular with left-leaning mainstream audiences

It is truly wild how HN often frames censorship as something coming purely from the left while ignoring the laws coming out of conservative state legislatures across the country. There is a wide spectrum of people both pushing for censorship and pushing against it.

Not to mention the censorship pressure exerted by family values groups’ complaints to the FCC. Those are generally very conservative groups who want to protect children from seeing a breast.

What is insane is when people frame anti-censorship as an alt-right value. That offends people like me who are staunchly liberal but completely anti-censorship to my core.

It's so pervasive that you can't even have an anti-censorship opinions on Reddit without getting lumped in with the alt-right and banned from subreddits. The nuance of "I disagree with you but defend your right to say it" is dying a painful death. Defend free speech and get accused of being alt-right or wanting to say the n-word.

Another thing dying is the defense of protests. I made a couple comments in popular Canadian subreddits about the truckers and was banned from a few for saying "protest isn't meant to make people feel happy and if the protestors don't make you feel uncomfortable you either agree with them or they're not doing their job". I got banned from one with the reason being "be gone nazi scum go try parler".

If you are talking about r/Ottawa, I can explain their reaction. What happened in downtown Ottawa was not a protest, but an occupation with heavy machinery in an attempt to make the PM look bad, and have to step down. There were many, many posters in that sub trying to paint the whole thing as a peaceful protest, but after a week of 150 air horns for ~18 hours a day, the benefit of the doubt was gone, and everyone repeating the same garbage was turfed.

Additionally, the sub saw many multiples of normal traffic, so mods were quick to ban anyone posting anything resembling a Fox talking point.

>What happened in downtown Ottawa was not a protest, but an occupation

Here's exactly my problem. This is the only narrative people are allowed to have on mainstream subreddits.

I'll admit it wasn't 100% peaceful but let's be honest here - it wasn't violent either and it wasn't an occupation. They demanded the PM step down or be removed by the GG because they don't understand how politics work here but visit some Canadian subreddits and what was done is widely regarded as a coup attempt. The view that it was a coup, or even an attempted coup, is literally insane and hysterical.

Regarding the length of the protest - Ottawa police sat on their hands and did nothing to stop or remove the truckers. When they finally did lift a finger to remove them they successfully removed them. It took 3 days but if they had just done something earlier it wouldn't have grown to as big as it did.

The other odd thing is to see so many journalists who have walked away from supporting free speech. They used to be some of the strongest supporters.

The cynical take is that free speech is great when you're the institutional gate-keeper, but not so much when the plebs can publish what they want.

Is there an example of a thriving online community that has absolutely no censorship? One gets the sense that once a platform commits publicly to never censor, it's overrun by people with extreme opinions, and the platform loses more reasonable people, who actually are the largest majority.

Oh, I guess I was thinking mainly about online censorship by tech platforms. I think most censorship from the right nowadays is about public schools?

Left and right censorship are applied to very different media. In the case of online platforms, the most visible attempts of censorship are coming from the left. At least I haven't heard of any opposite examples.

When one form of censorship is coming from private companies and the other form of censorship is coming from the government, I am definitely more concerned about the latter than the former.

The only modern examples of censorship coming from the right I can think of are the anti-CRT and "don't say gay" type bills. These laws are certainly problematic, but as tools of censorship, they're narrowly targeted at children, not adults. There's a pretty longstanding cultural consensus around censoring content targeted at children, for better or worse. We may not agree with the particular choices being made on the right here about content, but it doesn't seem to me like, per se, a free speech issue in the normal sense.

Maybe you are aware of some example that i'm not, though.

>as tools of censorship, they're narrowly targeted at children, not adults.

Children eventually become adults. How do we expect the adults of the future to deal with difficult topics like race if we prevent them from learning about them?

>Maybe you are aware of some example that i'm not, though.

I linked to another example in a different comment.[1]

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31085565

When an online platform is a de-facto monopoly, like Twitter or Facebook, I don't think it should be unilaterally censoring user content. I understand that content policy is a difficult problem, but I don't think "they are a private company they can do whatever they want" is the right answer.

Name a single such law passed in the past 4 years in the US? (Laws regulating the curricula of state-funded public schools don't count. Not using taxpayer money to support a view ≠ impinging on the right of private citizens and organizations to express that view with their own resources and funds)

I will ignore the bizarre exception you are making for "Laws regulating the curricula of state-funded public schools" because I can still point to other examples. Here is a law that passed this month in Florida that dictates what topics employers can discuss in diversity training programs.[1]

[1] - https://www.natlawreview.com/article/florida-s-stop-woke-act...

Why those reporting need to be intentionally biased? The bill is clearly about what the training programs can teach, not “discuss”. These two are clearly different. When a training program teaches white employees they are inherently racist, it’s totally different from a random person raises this idea from discussion.

This is a continuation of the same problem I highlighted before because it pretends that self-censorship only happens on the right. I have been through over a dozen diversity training courses in my career. Not a single one has ever said "white employees are inherently racists". This law is written against strawmen examples. Their goal isn't to stop those extreme examples. It is supposed to make companies fearful enough of a lawsuit, remember a lawsuit doesn't have to win to be costly and damaging, that they either dumb down this training or stop it entirely. The problem with censorship is not just what is actively censored. There is a much broader chilling effect that ends up censoring more topics even if they aren't explicitly banned.

If you never saw one then it does not exist. Good point.

Speaking of strawmen... You could have at least tried to address the point I was making.

You don't have a point. You live in an alternative reality which claims things exist in reality do not exist.

It's not a bizarre exception, it's completely normal. If a math teacher tells their students that 2+2=5, it's not an assault on free speech to fire the teacher.

I like how you challenged me to listed an example thinking none existed, I list an example, and then you completely ignored that I did. You didn't even try to weasel out of it by saying that example doesn't qualify, just fully 100% ignored that I proved you wrong.

I didn't "weasel out" of anything, I didn't address a portion of your comment because I judged that another commenter had already said everything I would have said.

Some seem to think that "cancel culture" started 5 years ago as well. It's a strange position to take which indicates a near total lack of research into the topic.

There's a difference a mile wide between censoring discussions between adults about complex current issues and censoring books being given to children.

On the right, banning books means trying to prevent their kids from reading them. But on the left it often means trying to prevent anyone from reading them.

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1515563419386191880

Do you have any sources that indicate anti-censorship is “hugely unpopular” with the mainstream intellectual community? For example, esteemed scientists speaking out against it?

It may be important here to separate journalists and political activists from the intellectual community. Not to say that they aren’t intellectuals, but the issue could be limited to that set of intellectuals in particular.

See NYT "hit" pieces on substack:

* https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/11/business/media/substack-n...

* https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/13/business/media/substack-g...

Along with one of Substack's founders responding to it: https://twitter.com/lulumeservey/status/1514318085083340807

Thanks for sharing these. From what I can see, the criticism here is coming entirely from journalists/activists.

It makes me wonder: how many of the opinions that we are exposed to originate from journalists/activists? How much are we mixing up the opinions of these people as representing the opinions of scientists, engineers and philosophers? How much are we mixing up the opinions of journalists/activists as representing those of your average person?

I'm starting to see a deep issue with the preeminence of journalist/activist opinion.

> "Anti-censorship" is hugely unpopular with the mainstream intellectual community these days.

I don’t know where did you get this idea? What did you mean “mainstream intellectual community”? Do you have any evidence like mass signatures supporting censorship from mainstream intellectuals?

People consume too much Reddit / Twitter sometimes live in an alternative reality.

It's unpopular among people who consume the writings of the intellectual community. It's less popular among intellectuals themselves, and even the pro-censorship intellectuals only want other people to be censored, not themselves.

It's well-aligned with "writers own their audience" - together this positions substack as a platform for monetizing writing, not as more of a publisher.

Totally agree.

"Anti-censorship" is definitely a dog whistle call out to the right wing: "Feel free to lie and spread dangerous misinformation on our platform."

I don't know if Substack actually allows "Fauci is the devil, all liberals are socialist pedophiles" writers on their site, but that's what they're promising to support.

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