I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either

Actions speak louder than words. Fuck Substack and fuck any platform that offers a safe haven for nazis.

Yea… Meta took the same “free peaches” approach and the entire fucking globe is now dealing with various versions of white nationalism. So like, can we actually give censorship of hate a fucking try for once? I’m willing to go down that road.

“we don’t like or condone bigotry in any form.” I mean they are litterally Condoning bigotry.

“His response similarly doesn’t engage other questions from the Substackers Against Nazis authors, like why these policies allow it to moderate spam and newsletters from sex workers but not Nazis.”

Doesn’t seem very consistent.

For anyone who remembers the interview the CEO did with the Verge back when they launched Notes, this isn’t surprising at all.

You can see a transcript here. The relevant section can be found by searching all brown people are animals or more specifically just animals and reading on from there.

I’m not sure if the video footage of the interview is still available, but it’s even worse because you can see that the CEO is completely lost when talking about the idea of moderating anything and basically shuts down because they have nothing to say all while the interview is politely berating them about how they’re obviously failing a litmus test.

Do note that above the point where “animals” occurs is some post-hoc context provided by the interviewer (perhaps why the video is no longer easily available?) where they point out that the question they asked and the response they got wasn’t exactly as extreme as it first appeared. But they also point out that it’s still very notable despite the slightly mitigating correction and I’d agree entirely, especially if you watch(ed) the video and clocked the CEO’s demeanor and lack of any intelligent thought on the issue.

Here’s a Wired article featuring four good alternatives to Substack.

I want them to explain how it makes things worse.

We already knew that SS liked Nazis.

All joking aside, silencing Nazis and deplatforming them is LITERALLY fighting against them. How is allowing them to make money and market themselves on your platform doing anything to stem the tide of Nazism? Obviously they’re playing culture war games and saying they’re not.

So they have no rules, any content is acceptable?

Anything less is “censorship” after all

TIL that Substack is apparently a bunch of crypto-fascists who expect people to believe they don’t support Nazis, they just give them money and a place at their table to talk about it.

I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views.

“But we’ll gladly host those views on our platform, run ads alongside them, and profit from them.”

Cool… so they now facilitate and directly benefit from Nazi activity. Sounds great when you put it like that.

If a Nazi has a large subscription following than Substack would be directly profiting from Nazi content.

Translated: McKenzie just wants the sweet money and is trying to gaslight us into thinking platforming nazis is ok.

Techbros tolerate Nazis.

You can run your own blog with WordPress. It even Federates.

To be clear — what McKenzie is saying here is that Substack will continue to pay Nazis to write Nazi essays. Not just that they will host Nazi essays (at Substack’s cost), but they will pay for them.

They are, in effect, hiring Nazis to compose Nazi essays.