Substack's Dilemma
margaretatwood.substack.com
margaretatwood.substack.com
There isn’t much evidence for deplatforming Nazis being a slippery slope. They don’t even have to ban them; just turn off monetisation.
Also, given Substack “moderate[s] some content, including spam sites and newsletters written by sex workers,” it would seem the ship has sailed. Drawing the line at Nazis is, at best, naïve.
Quick search on Twitter will find many, many people calling many many other people Nazi. Those alleged to be Nazis include the former President, members of congress, and the head of a prominent auto maker.
TOS are open to wide interpretation.
The article answers this efficiently:
“What does ‘Nazi’ mean, or signify? Many things, but among them is ‘Kill all Jews.’ This is not an opinion. It’s a call for actions, such as blowing up a synagogue with people inside or murdering 6 million people who are Jews.”
Put another way, I don’t see Atwood calling for banning Nazis per se. She’s calling for doing something about people calling for the extermination of Jews. That is precise and narrow.
I am frequently called a Nazi (despite being on, and identifying as left wing, my entire life) on X simply for having the temerity to challenge certain orthodoxies.
Denying that the term has been stretched to its breaking point, especially in light of its use by Russia in justifying the SMO in Ukraine, strains any kind of reasonable credulity.
Are you calling for the extermination of Jews? No? Then you are fine.
> Denying that the term has been stretched to its breaking point
This is a straw man. Nobody is denying this. It’s not even relevant—the article never calls for banning anyone anybody considers a Nazi.
I don't think outright censorship is a good thing, but monetization / not putting them into suggested content (not sure what's the proper term) should be used. There will be judgment calls made, but that's IMHO OK.
We can have that discussion separately. The beauty of this article is the simplicity of its argument. If you're calling for the extermination of Jews (or any protected class), you're in a category of your own.
Interestingly where I live we have no equivelant of "Safe Harbour" laws which prevent a platform for being sued or criminally liable for content posted by users. I became acutely aware of the risk I was taking when fringe interests started showing up. Luckily no criminally fringe users had found the platform yet.
That said, count yourself lucky in America, for such laws enable a whole heap of platforms that get general use but also abused by fringe users as it is very challenging to moderate free platforms.
I initially supported the idea of banning Nazi accounts but then this thought experiment occurred to me and I couldn’t come up with a coherent view. Why ban one and not the other? Yet banning communist accounts would seem a bit much. Hence no coherent view.
From the article: “What does ‘Nazi’ mean, or signify? Many things, but among them is ‘Kill all Jews.’
Atwood doesn’t call for banning Nazis per se. She wants something done about calls to violent action.
What policy? There is no policy? Nobody is being banned.
This argument is akin to saying we can’t block spam because otherwise we’ll block all political messaging. Like, no. We can just block the former. Just because someone on the planet can’t distinguish them doesn’t mean we all can’t.
This is true but irrelevant. The standard is calling for the extermination of Jews. Substack moderating sex workers' posts but not Nazis' (specifically, people calling for the exterminatino of Jews) is inconsistent; that's what Atwood is calling out.
Yes, I think so. It is possible (and, I mean, even basically the default) to be an ideologically consistent communist without any interest in mass killing; that's far more difficult for literal Nazis.
> Historically as practiced communism has involved mass murder of class enemies for political reasons.
I mean, to some extent, what ideology _hasn't_? It's not a core and necessary component of most ideologies, though.
Come on, Margaret Atwood. You can do better than this. "Protected class," "inciting," and "credible threat" are all specific legal terms, and you can look them up rather than invent your own definitions in service of your argument.
Later ... "anyone displaying the insignia or claiming the name is in effect saying ..." [emphasis added]
"In effect" is doing a lot of work here and is not in accordance with the Content Guidelines (not Terms of Service).
A swastika is a symbol of hate, and Substack could choose to ban display of such symbols, but they don't. A symbol alone is not the same as an incitement to violence.
And the reason they don't ban hate symbols, I'm guessing, is that they would have to list them explicitly. And how do you categorize, for instance, the Palestinian flag or the Israeli flag? There are large, non-overlapping populations of people in this country claiming that one or the other are symbols of hate.
I'm no fan of Nazis, and if Substack wants to deplatform them, I'm all for it, but they'll need to rewrite their Content Guidelines to do it. And in the meantime, I wish the folks campaigning against them would bring a little more rigor to their arguments.
I think she did a fine job of laying out her argument so everyone could understand. A "protected class" implies there are classes that are not protected. Atwood was making it clear that that protected class should mean any groupable people by trait.
> And the reason they don't ban hate symbols, I'm guessing, is that they would have to list them explicitly.
You don't have to list things explicitly to ban them. A no swearing policy doesn't list every swear word publicly. A no homophobia policy doesn't explicitly list every act of homophobia possible.
> A symbol alone is not the same as an incitement to violence.
I think a group of people protesting with certain symbols would be a call to violence. Symbols convey meaning. Some symbols have been used and associated with humanity's worst acts and carry with it that meaning.
> And how do you categorize, for instance, the Palestinian flag or the Israeli flag?
State flags are state flags, I'm not sure you can categorically call them symbols of hate. A Hamas flag (a group of people that have specifically called for the death of all Jews) is a symbol of hate, despite a non-zero number of people thinking otherwise.
I find it difficult to imagine that expressing opposition to the most universally-opposed people on the planet counts as "Gratifying to intellectual curiosity". Gratifying, perhaps, but involves about zero intellectual curiosity.
Maybe try this one on Facebook or Twitter instead?
Consider giving https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html a read.
* Militant anti semites. * American anti-immigration Republicans. * Non violent, white supremacist groups.
But really what we want to do is kick violent extremists off the platform. There are many violent extremists who should be banned who are not Nazis. For example
* Calls for the genocide of anyone (Jewish or otherwise) * Calls for political violence.
Deplatform all the "bad guys" but we shouldn't pretend "deplatform Nazis" is a precise call.
The rise of the Nazis within the Weimar Republic and how they gradually accumulated sufficient power to carry out the holocaust is the classic lesson from history that we should never allow to happen again.
Over the past couple of decades (possibly longer), I’ve noticed people – both on the left (point-scoring and attempting to generate outrage) and the right (holocaust deniers and fellow travellers) – water down the meanings of political terms such as Nazism. These attempts serve the interests of actual neo-Nazis. The problem with labelling ordinary “American anti-immigration Republicans” as “Nazis” is that when genuine neo-Nazis advocate the use violence to resist the “Zionist occupational government”, referring to them as Nazis no longer carries the weight that it should have.
You are a bit incorrect, no, a lot incorrect.
Anyone using the term "Nazi" to refer to 21st century Americans who are nonviolently opposed to immigration or generic WN's needs to read a history book. Or two. Or ten. Or maybe visit a Holocaust museum.
Also why single out calls for "political violence"? Initiating any kind of violence is always wrong, period. All calls for violence should be scrutinized for legitimacy (as opposed to poor-taste parody/satire) and fiercely opposed if serious, not only political violence.
The mere act of suggesting that the term "Nazi" is ambiguous and conflating it with nonviolent groups is ignorant and antisemitic in and of itself. It completely downplays, obscures, and minimizes the horrific and brutal conditions the Jewish people suffered in the 20th century, before over 7 million of them were systematically killed at the hands of the Nazis, a very specific group holding political power in Germany from the 1930s through the end of WW2 in 1945.
I hope for your sake you never make such an offensive and patently absurd remark in front a Jewish coworker. What you're insinuating is genuinely offensive and insulting to the uniquely terrible hardships they've suffered.
Seriously, go visit a Holocaust memorial before you confuse anyone else.
Second, your definition is the textbook definition but it's not the colloquial definition. That was my point.
There are circumstances where colloquialisms are inappropriate, like a caucasian person repeating a racial slur in a song that was originally sung by a person of color.
Equating literal genocide with immigration policy preferences, however despicable they may be, leans heavily towards the latter.
I have ancestors who were victims of systematic genocide at the hands of Nazis. Let me know when the Republicans start gassing people and throwing them in ovens, I'll be the first one to call them Nazis and exercise force to defend the innocent.
Until that happens, respectfully, please stop doing the antisemitic equivalent of shouting the N word in public and insisting that it's okay to do so on the basis that you're only citing other people's words.
It's hurtful, but more importantly than that, as Anthony-G pointed out, it's dangerous. It's like crying wolf, only, instead of the threat being a wolf, it's an entire industrialized society engaged in organized genocide.