Substack faces user revolt over anti-censorship stance on neo-Nazis
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
What is up with the lack of good faith from so many in this thread (not you, the parent)?
They don't want to be confronted with the breaking points of their ideology, but instead have to misdirect with some straw-man about another scenario.
And like a misdirected fool, I take the bait and comment on it.
That's certainly true, but it sure is weird when a certain political leaning causes one to minimize the fact that actual Nazis showed up, which casts a hefty shadow on this perceived boundary between "actual nazi" and "not actual nazi". At what point does one stop imagining that enablement isn't a real thing? Shrug emoji, though, I guess.
You seem to be badly missing the point here. A forum for eating is not a place for broadcasting political views. A newsletter platform is. The two aren't comparable.
> A newsletter platform is [a place for broadcasting political views]
I'm not saying that your assumption is wrong. I'm asking:
1. Why is it reasonable to make that assumption?
2. How much say does the platform owner have over the extent to which the platform is "a place for broadcasting political views"? Put another way, how much leeway should a general purpose newsletter platform have to ban certain topics/speech, including spam?
Spam isn't newsletters, so that seems like a non sequitur. Newsletters are meant to go to people who signed up for them.
As for how much say does the owner of the "printing press" have, the answer is that in a civilized society they should have the final say. In less civilized societies than the USA the government thinks it's smarter than the populace, and should control their information. History shows us that governments which smash up the printing presses were rarely smart.
Sorry, I was just too vague with my first question. A newsletter can be used for broadcasting political views. But it doesn't have to be used for broadcasting all political views, and can be used to broadcast views that aren't directly related to politics. A newsletter can broadcast only views the owners of the service tolerate (not necessarily want) on the site. It's not reasonable to assume that Substack is a place for all political views, and Substack is fully in the right to ban certain ones without banning others. I bring this up due to my personal speculation: Substack decided not to remove articles openly advocating Nazi beliefs, but had Substack gone the other way then a loud subset of anti-censorship believers would paint the opposite decision - to remove such articles - as "giving in to the mob" (or less likely, giving in to nonexistent coercion from a government) rather than as an equally voluntary, valid, and democracy-compatible decision.
> Spam isn't newsletters, so that seems like a non sequitur.
You're right. Spam was a terrible example. A better example would've been articles advocating something extreme such as complete destruction of Ukraine. Or a topic on a different axis, such as advocacy of sexual gratification (which Substack does ban).
> Newsletters are meant to go to people who signed up for them.
The Substack moderation controversy is not about who gets newsletters. It's about authors on Substack who don't want to associate with certain beliefs posted by other authors. (In this context, spam was relevant if only tangentially; I wouldn't want to write a newsletter using a platform too notorious for user-generated spam newsletters. Nonetheless, I was wrong to use spam as an example.)
> In less civilized societies than the USA the government thinks it's smarter than the populace, and should control their information. History shows us that governments which smash up the printing presses were rarely smart.
Agreed. What bothers me about the Substack controversy is that people are emphasizing the government in the conversation even though the critics of Substack's moderation policy aren't trying to make the government do anything and aren't forcing Substack's hand. Just because the complainers are forceful in their language doesn't mean they are coercing Substack into agreeing with them (unless someone's been Machiavellian enough to doxx Substack employees or threaten the employees' safety; even then, guilt generally wouldn't apply to the entire mob). An online mob is part of the populace just as people who oppose the mob are. Non-governmental requests to moderate in a certain way are equally democratic as non-governmental requests not to moderate in that way as long as Substack gets to make the final decisions. Boycotting is not coercion and is democratic. Advocacy of boycotting are not coercion and are democratic. Criticism of boycotting is not coercion and is democratic. Doxxing is coercion. Threats to personal safety are coercion. The mob did not control Substack's decision here. This would be true even if Substack had decided to agree with the mob's moderation policies.
They actually did. Look at my other post on this thread that examines the Atlantic's cited examples. The only one that is actually clearly Nazi is suspended for ToS violations. The others are all nothing to do with Nazis, but it's a Tuesday so the left is claiming otherwise to try and censor their opponents.
> It's about authors on Substack who don't want to associate with certain beliefs posted by other authors.
And if they succeeded then it'd be "we don't want to be on the same internet as those other authors" and so on. Those people will never stop trying to shut down people who disagree with them and will certainly lie in order to get that outcome. Never trust censors!
> the critics of Substack's moderation policy aren't trying to make the government do anything
Remember that many governments outside of America ban websites for vague reasons like "hate speech". It's not just about the USA.
> Boycotting is not coercion and is democratic
They didn't want to do a boycott, they wanted their opponents to be denied the right to speech. They might end up trying a boycott now but it's not clear what it means to boycott a service like Substack, because they weren't receiving the material they were objecting to in the first place.
Customers can complain about other customers to waiters and restaurant owners. That can happen in person, in reviews, or on customers' blog articles (you know, like the articles they post on Substack, if Substack lets them). "I overheard that other customer saying that waiters get paid too much." "4 stars. I'm reluctant to keep going to the restaurant though, because the waiters do nothing about loud customers." "That restaurant doesn't kick out people wearing Nazi symbols. Boycott it." A customer's suggestions can be unreasonable. The owner can ignore (un)reasonable suggestions. The waiter can ignore (un)reasonable suggestions and decide not to let the owner know about them. But kicking out a customer on the basis of customer complaints isn't necessarily less valid than kicking out a customer who hasn't attracted complaints from other customers or letting a customer who has attracted complaints stay.
What about Kiwi Farms and Stormfront? I'm pretty sure that was right too.
Society is replete with restrictions on speech that are considered uncontroversial even amongst most die-hard libertarians. It's weird that standing up against neo-nazis always seems to be a bridge too far.
And this isn't even censorship. No one is restricting the speech of the nazis on Substack. Rather, people are choosing not to associate themselves with a platform that welcomes nazis. They're voting with their money and their feet. Free speech doesn't guarantee you a platform nor does it guarantee you an audience. If it's to be a market of ideas, then it's encumbent upon the proponents of ideas to negotiate with the market.
You might reply that these efforts are putting pressure on Substack and attempting to influence Substack to change their policies. And so what? That's a perfectly valid use of free speech, isn't it?
Do laws against "doxxing" even exist at all, or is that something you made up? Journalists "doxx" people they don't like all the time, apparently without consequence.
Laws against threats of violence are extremely controversial because the left constantly tries to redefine the term violence to encompass any views they don't like. In the USA the exact definition of "imminent" in respect to violence speech has consumed considerable attention from the courts.
Child porn is the least controversial, but even there, you will find controversy. Apple rolled back their plan to scan everyone's iPhones for child porn due to how controversial it is, right? And there is significant debate about what the actual legal age of minority is, because it varies around the world, and whether cartoons count or not.
False advertising: this is the least controversial form of speech control for libertarians because they want informed markets, but even here, it's controversial because governments suck at enforcing such laws neutrally. Consider all the news agencies that advertise themselves as neutral whilst being obviously biased.
Planning a crime: the border between people making idle threats and actually being legally liable is constantly being thrashed out by the courts even today, and usually convicting someone of this requires more than just speech. You have to actually take action towards carrying out the crime, not just saying you will.
In short, none of your examples are free of controversy. So the allegation you're insinuating there - that everyone who disagrees with you on this is a secret Nazi - does not work.
> No one is restricting the speech of the nazis on Substack.
In fact they are, because Substack does ban genuinely Nazi accounts. See the Andikon Reich example. This doesn't bother anyone because it's a very clear and precise match. The fuss is the usual problem where the left label anyone to their right banned under whatever rules are the most emotive, even when they don't apply at all.
1. The owner of a website hosting user-generated content (such as social media posts) voluntarily bans users for speech the owner didn't like.
2. A government forces the owner of a website hosting user-generated content to ban users for speech the government didn't like.
Why and when is it reasonable to treat patterns 1 and 2 as sufficiently analogous to be counted under a single banner of "censorship"? Consider a third pattern as well.
3. A company offers tours of the buildings to outsiders who apply for tours. A tour visitor says something the owner doesn't like, so the owner voluntarily bans the visitor from continuing the tour.
Is it reasonable to call pattern 3 censorship? And if it is, is the so-called censorship in pattern 3 "in the wrong", "no matter the circumstances"?
Substack is a case of pattern 1. How should someone track which instances of Substack's moderation of XYZ ended up being "in the right" vs "in the wrong"? XYZ could be people who write in favor of Nazi beliefs (who Substack isn't banning). XYZ could be people who write in favor of sexual gratification (who Substack is banning).
As Ken White (Popehat) wrote about Substack's policy regarding Nazis [1]:
> My point is not that any of these policies is objectionable. But, like the old joke goes, we’ve established what Substack is, now we’re just haggling over the price.
...
> Substack has made a series of value judgments about which speech to permit and which speech not to permit. Substack would like you to believe that making judgments about content “for the sole purpose of sexual gratification,” or content promoting anorexia, is different than making judgment about Nazi content. In fact, that’s not a neutral, value-free choice. It’s a valued judgment by a platform that brands itself as not making valued judgments.
[1] https://popehat.substack.com/p/substack-has-a-nazi-opportuni...
Puritans back in the old days were basically the Taliban, oppressing anyone who disagreed with their beliefs and way-of-life. They were pretty successful overall.
In Syria, Assad successfully crushed a revolt and is still in power by suppressing speech etc.
In the Arab world, the Arab Spring was successfully squished in multiple countries.
Communist China has been relatively successful by restricting speech.
"In the right" is probably the wrong metric, because it's meaningless. "Succeeded in its goals" is probably a better way of categorizing whether a specific tactic is successful or not. And success depends on the timeframe as well.
And the U.S. wasn’t always as unrestricted. Famously, people have been imprisoned for handing out antiwar pamphlets.
Without moderation, forums quickly become unusable. If you disagreed, you'd be on 4chan, not Hacker News.
So I think you recognize the utility of at least some level of content moderation, which is a specific type of speech restriction.
Fair?
I would consider taking my audience elsewhere as well.
It is tough because separating freedom of expression from hate speech is hard and prone to errors, but the alternate is to let Nazis and other hate groups to grow and strengthen. History has shown that when evil is given a platform, it grows instead of withering away in the light.
> I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.
Ideals require integrity to function, not unlike how cheating during a diet won't get you anywhere. If you think the ideals of liberal democracy aren't strong enough to weather a few naysayers in the public forum then you probably never believed in them in the first place.
But it should be obvious given the last decade or so, if you've been living above a rock, that the internet and social media provide a force multiplier for speech that, due to the priorities and incentives of algorithms, prioritizes speech many might consider harmful and dangerous. One can no longer naively accept truisms such as "sunlight is the best disinfectant" and "the only answer to bad speech is good speech" when history has shown that the playing field is not level, and that despite being exposed to the light of day, running riot across the internet and being debated furously on all fronts, these groups only feed upon, harness and grow amidst the controversy and chaos. However, limiting the scope and velocity by which they can spread their message and recruit has proven effective in slowing their influence, if not stopping them altogether.
You're also presenting a false dichotomy here. We don't have to choose between restricting hate speech and fighting hate groups on other fronts, we can do both. However, just as one does not deprogram a victim from within a cult, one cannot effectively address the root cause of the spread of racism and hate in an environment where that message spreads unabated.
"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it," indeed.
> Andkon’s Reich Press, for example, calls itself “a National Socialist newsletter”; its logo shows Nazi banners on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, and one recent post features a racist caricature of a Chinese person. A Substack called White-Papers, bearing the tagline “Your pro-White policy destination,” is one of several that openly promote the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that inspired deadly mass shootings at a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, synagogue; two Christchurch, New Zealand, mosques; an El Paso, Texas, Walmart; and a Buffalo, New York, supermarket.
> Other newsletters make prominent references to the “Jewish Question.” Several are run by nationally prominent white nationalists; at least four are run by organizers of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—including the rally’s most notorious organizer, Richard Spencer.
> 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.” Several, including Spencer’s, sport official Substack “bestseller” badges, indicating that they have at a minimum hundreds of paying subscribers. A subscription to the newsletter that Spencer edits and writes for costs $9 a month or $90 a year, which suggests that he and his co-writers are grossing at least $9,000 a year and potentially many times that. Substack, which takes a 10 percent cut of subscription revenue, makes money when readers pay for Nazi newsletters.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-e...