More than 200 Substack authors asked the platform to explain why it’s “platforming and monetizing Nazis,” and now they have an answer straight from co-founder Hamish McKenzie:
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.
While McKenzie offers no evidence to back these ideas, this tracks with the company’s previous stance on taking a hands-off approach to moderation. In April, Substack CEO Chris Best appeared on the Decoder podcast and refused to answer moderation questions. “We’re not going to get into specific ‘would you or won’t you’ content moderation questions” over the issue of overt racism being published on the platform, Best said. McKenzie followed up later with a similar statement to the one today, saying “we don’t like or condone bigotry in any form.”
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.