- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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.”
Not that yours is so much better. Imagine replacing “nazis” with “pro-choice”, still sure the platform should remove the contents ?
Pro-choice content isn’t an incitement to violence. I’m not going to pretend being pro-choice is equivalent in any sense to being a Nazi just because some people are too stupid to see the difference.
A lot of the time people have this conversation from the perspective of the person who has no horse in the race. They aren’t a Nazi, nor are a target of Nazis. It ignores the people who are effected.
Imagine you are in a space and someone posts a death threat targeting you. Others rally around that as any censorship is bad censorship. Every time you use that space you get a reminder of how someone particularly wants you dead. Now imagine that becomes just a regular part of your day. Over and over and over again you are exposed to people smugly calling you less than human, a threat to society, a moraless degenerate. You get this nice cold shock whenever you see it and get to remember how vulnerable you are, how gleeful these calls to take your rights away for something you never opted into and can’t opt out of… And you are expected to take whatever anxiety is sown in you as just normal. That burden of people gleefully discussing your death just gets to be a part of your everyday. To others looking at you dealing with that burden it is treated as tolerable level of permanent unhappiness. It’s simply not supposed to be other people’s problem. You may not ask for assistance with managing those burdens because the cost of societies “tolerance” for speech has decided that you must personally pay for everyone’s unrestricted discourse.
Then there’s the other half. Say I create a platform. Maybe I am running a print shop. I maintain it, run it, and think that I am doing society a service for facilitating a means to communicate. I find out someone has been printing death threats at my shop. Maybe they are even death threats towards someone I know. How would I feel knowing someone is taking the resources I manage, using the infrastructure I maintain to specifically terrorize someone? This person printing these death threats made ME complicit in spreading their death threat so that someone in the above example gets to feel unsafe as they go about their day. In fact, spreading death threats is a crime. Should I not be allowed to refuse to take their business?
We as a society have the ability to differentiate between death threats and other political discourse. Calling for a genocide of a group of people - is a death threat. It may not be directed at a singular person but lemme tell you when you are the target it feels like it might as well be calling on you by name. There is no moderation policy, even an unrestricted one, that is truly ethically neutral. Your choices about what is or isn’t allowed on your watch always effects people and the mental cost is borne by someone.
Very smart post, highly.
If it is illegal then I am sure that a judge should not have any problem to order substack to remove the posts.
You are making a case where there is somenthing illegal going on, if the law do not protect you, it is the law that is wrong, not someone doing something lawful (but morally wrong for other people)
Law is a funny beast. Lots of people do things which are illegal all the time and get away with it because you basically have to assert your right to be protected by law to sort of activate it. Like someone yelling at me that they are going to kill me while I am out in public is technically a form of assult. , I can call the authorities and get them to assist me to make sure they don’t follow through and to get them to stay the hell away from me but chances are I am not going to seek restitution in court for something that small because I would have to press charges, seek and pay for legal council, everything would need to be processed to make sure the law is being properly handled at all points of the arrest and the punishment would likely be fairly trifling for all my troubles.
Private entities already basically have the imperitive to determine what is permissible on their platforms. Freedom of speech is not practiced under the auspices of substack. They are allowed to kick you out for whatever the heck they want (some exceptions applying) because they own that space. To remove posts as threats a judge would have to go through each individual one, source it, bring the original commenter into court and go through due process with every single user to check it against their local jurisdiction’s laws for threats and the likely outcome would just be small fines and community service… Quite frankly the juice would not be worth the squeeze.
On the other hand we are absolutely allowed to have an opinion that substack letting Nazis spread hate speech on their platform under their watch is a moral failure on their part.
Your analogy is false but yes if you are pro-forced birth you should not profit from pro-choice groups. Personal integrity is important and while I very much don’t agree with the forced birth crowd I am willing to pretend that some of them are sincere.
And why ? Just because I pointed out a scenario that do not imply a clearly illegal situation like yours ?
You are right from a a personal perspective, I as a person must have personal integrity.
But a platform ? Should not be the duty of a platform to carry both points of view and let the reader to decide what is wrong or what is good ?
Should a newspaper not talk about something because some readers don’t agree with it ? Because that is what you are saying: what I think is true and good while what they think is wrong and bad, and so they need to be removed.
If someone says it is raining outside, the newspaper’s job is to actually check whether it is raining outside NOT to say it both is and is not raining and let their “readers decide.”
You are arguing that newspapers should discuss NAZI ideals as if they are as valid as any other. No one decent agrees with you.
Nope, I am arguing that if something is not illegal it is not up to the platform to censor it.
If that 200 authors asked a judge to command substack to remove the post, then good.
If you decide that today is good that a platform censor something, (and I agree that nazis are not that nice thing to even consider to discuss) then tomorrow you cannot protest that a platform remove something that you consider good.
Like Meta removing all the pro palestinian post/propaganda: is it acceptable that it is Meta to decide that even if it is not illegal?
Free speech is absolute, and it include even what we hate.
Free speech IS NOT freedom from social consequences. And one of those social consequences is that people are allowed to tell you to take a hike.
And I agree. But it seems that you still don’t understand how dangerous is to go after the platform instead of the authors of the messages.
But let’s suppose that it is correct to go after the platform, so this time the offending content is removed. Fine, good thing.
Next month 174 authors ask to remove everything about the right to have an abortion because they are offended by it and they think that it is wrong (and in some place it is even illegal), what do you think should happen?
You are arguing as if people are wanting the government to intervene and that IS NOT what people are saying. People are allowed to not want an entire company to be a fascist bar.
I feel like you feel this is a clever gotcha, but I don’t follow.
If substack (or most any private platform) decided not to host any pro-choice content, many people would probably say that’s a shit move. Some anti-abortion people might support it, maybe. What’s your point?
You shouldn’t evaluate the situation with a naive “did they remove content? Any content at all?” metric. You need to consider what was removed and why.
It’s also important to remember we’re not talking about the government silencing or compelling speech. We’re talking about private parties moderating their platform. It’s important that they retain the legal right to choose what to say. And then the public can jeer and refuse to associate with them if they use their rights badly.