It is true that removing and demonetising Nazi content wouldn't make the problem of Nazis go away. It would just be moved to dark corners of the internet where the majority of people would never find it, and its presence on dodgy-looking websites combined with its absence on major platforms would contribute to a general sense that being a Nazi isn't something that's accepted in wider society. Even without entirely making the problem go away, the problem is substantially reduced when it isn't normalised.

I really struggle to take seriously what these tech people say about ‘not wanting to censor’. They made a business calculation, and maybe an ideological one, and decided “we want that nazi money, it’s worth it to us.” which really tells you everything about a company and how it is likely to approach other issues, too.

Not gonna lie. I've never heard of Substack but I appreciate their stance of publicly announcing why I would continue to avoid them.

techno-libertarianism strikes again! it's every few years with these guys where they have to learn the same lesson over again that letting the worst scum in politics make use of your website will just ensure all the cool people evaporate off your website--and Substack really does not have that many cool people or that good of a reputation to begin with.

Translation: "We support Nazis and would like to offer them passive protection. If you have a problem with them, we will ban you"

2023 and talking about deplatforming nazis is controversial. This is where we're at, folks.

If they plan to do business in the EU this is illegal.

What do you mean banning doesn't work? The less reach those Nazis have the less people can see their Nazi-Posts and get turned into Nazis. Also it needs to be clear that being a Nazi is not acceptable so they don't have the courage to spread their hate. This bullshit needs to stop.

Reading about this at work the other day, I announced to my coworkers that Substack is officially bad. Profiting off of nazi propaganda is bad. Fuck Substack.

I had recently subscribed to the RSS feed for The Friendly Atheist and was considering monetary support. They accept via Substack or Patreon. I would have opted for Patreon anyway, because that's where I already have subscriptions. But after learning about this, I'll never support anything, no matter what, via Substack. Eat my ass, shitheads.

Any writers still on SubStack need to immeadiately look at alternative options and shift their audiences to other platforms. To stick around on the site when the founder straight up condones neo nazis and not only gives them a platform, but profit shares with them and their nazi subscribers is insane.

if you say nazi and white supremacist content is just a "different point of view", you support nazi and white supremacist content. period.

and it's not surprising since lulu meservey's post on twitter when the whole situation with elon basically abandoning moderation.

"Substack is hiring! If you’re a Twitter employee who’s considering resigning because you’re worried about Elon Musk pushing for less regulated speech… please do not come work here."

https://www.inverse.com/input/culture/substack-hiring-elon-musk-tweet

There's a lot of empirical claims surrounding this topic, and I'm unaware who really has good evidence for them. The Substack guy e.g. is claiming that banning or demonetising would not "solve the problem" – how do we really know? At the very least, you'd think that demonetising helps to some extent, because if it's not profitable to spread certain racist ideas, that's simply less of an incentive. On the other hand, plenty of people on this thread are suggesting it does help address the problem, pointing to Reddit and other cases – but I don't think anyone really has a grip on the empirical relationship between banning/demonetising, shifting ideologues to darker corners of the internet and what impact their ideas ultimately have. And you'd think the relationship wouldn't be straightforward either – there might be some general patterns but it could vary according to so many contingent and contextual factors.

Nope, never supporting anything from substacks again. "Freeze peach" libertarians can go to hell.

I always hate policy talk trying to split the hairs of Nazism and “calls for violence”.

Even worse, I just can’t get allowing monetization. If you truly “hate the views”, stop lining your pocket with their money…

There are too many of these goddamned social networks anyway. After Twitter/X exploded, everyone else wanted to grab a piece of that pie, and now we've got a dozen social networks nobody uses.

If you want a progressive social network that doesn't take shit from goosesteppers, Cohost is probably the place to go. It's so neurodivergent and trans-friendly that I can't imagine them blithely accepting Nazi content. It's just not how Cohost works. "Blah blah blah, free speech!" Not here, chumps. We've got standards. Go somewhere else to push that poison.

Substack started so well... It was looking like the new Medium (after medium totally enshittified). But the discovery was never very good there, and now this. Nope. Not going to blog there.

I wonder if Snowden still supports them.

Does nobody remember the exact same dust-up the day after Substack launched?