Substack says it will not remove or demonetize Nazi content
Substack says it will not remove or demonetize Nazi content
“We don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away.”
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.”
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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.
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"I want you to know that I don't like nazis. But I am fine platforming them and profiting from them. Now here is some bullshit about silencing 'ideas.'"
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"I don't like Nazis... but you have to understand, they're very profitable."
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If there are 10 nazis at a table and you decide to sit among them, there are 11 nazis sitting at that table.
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So you think Deeyah Khan is a Nazi?
(I’d encourage anyone to watch White Right: Meeting the Enemy if you haven’t seen it.)
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Fuck. Off.
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Out of curiosity, let's say a man needs a place for sleep, and for get one, he decides to help out a nazi, for example by fixing their long distance radio, would you call this person a nazi,@xkforce@lemmy.world ?
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Why couldn't the man go to a homeless shelter, or a church, or a bus stop, or a park bench, or literally anywhere other than a Nazi's house? Also, what does a Nazi need a long distance radio for? Maybe by fixing it and not asking questions he's helping them coordinate with other fascists to hurt and kill people. Is that worth a place to sleep for a night? Is it worth a few bucks if you're not homeless but actually a wealthy business owner who can do as they please?
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Nazis don’t deserve help. They fundamentally are antisocial in their ideology. By helping them, you aid a Nazi. Why would you willingly help a Nazi?
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Who the fuck feels safe sleeping among Nazis? That's a good way to get robbed.
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🤡
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what a stupid fucking argument
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Hearing some one out and not changing your viewpoint after the conversation, doesn't make you one of them. 🙄
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There are some things not worth listening to. Not all opinions are created equal.
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Nazi lives don't matter.
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Zero tolerance for nazis. Zero.
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Agreed. However, providing a platform for hate speech is no different than condoning it.
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But hearing them out and deciding to allow them to promote their views on your website is passive endorsement.
Or, to follow the metaphor: if you hear them out over entrees and you're still sitting there during dessert, then you're probably one of them.
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When it comes to listening to hate speech and not condoning it outrright then and there, even if you don't explicitly support it, it does make you complicit, and it shows you're willing to turn a blind eye to it, and that speaks negatively to your character.
Don't be a Nazi sympathizer, don't let them off the hook, don't let them spread their hate and lies. You disagree with Nazism? Then don't give it even an inch to spread. Kill it in the cradle.
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No, but thinking a Nazi has valuable information to offer is sus.
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Big difference between having a conversation and having a media company distributing propaganda.
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go fuck yourself cunt
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Freedom of speech doesn't mean that you are obligated to host a platform so shitty people can use it to share shitty ideals. It simply means that you won't get arrested on a federal level.
Websites can do whatever they want, including deciding that they don't want to be a platform for hate speech. If people are seeking a place for this conversation genre to happen, and they want it enough, they can run their own website.
Imagine if you invited a friend of a friend over, and they were sharing nasty ideals at your Christmas party. And they brought their friends. Are you just going to sit there and let them turn your dinner into a political rally? No, you're going to kick them out. It's your dinner, like it is your website. If you don't kick them out, then at some level, you're aligning with them.
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I like your example there a lot, I’m going to use that in the future when I’m trying to express that notion. In the past I’ve never been able to articulate that exact concept. So thanks!
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Do not tolerate the intolerant.
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Toleration is a social contract. Those that break the contract should not be allowed to seek protection under it.
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This is such a wonderfully ironic statement. It is through toleration that they are painted in a poor light.
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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.
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Never ever fall for that one. You can look at various regimes in the world what happens when "hate" gets censored. Demonitizing is one thing, technical implementations to "live censor hate" would be catastrophic.
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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.
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Not exactly. Substack subscribers pay subscription fees, the content author keeps roughly 80% of the fees, and the rest goes to Substack or to offset hosting costs. The Nazi subscribers are paying the Nazi publishers, and money is flowing from the Nazi subscribers to Substack because of that operation (not away from Substack as it would be if they hired Nazis).
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“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.
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Condone (transitive verb): To overlook, forgive, or disregard (an offense) without protest or censure.
Neat.
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Interesting, I generally think of the Merriam-Webster definition:
to regard or treat (something bad or blameworthy) as acceptable, forgivable, or harmless
Or perhaps even further than that: actually approving of something. Guess “condone” is a little weaker of a word than I thought. But its popularity calls for being extra careful of even overlooking wrongdoing.
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Funny how words mean things
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So substack is a pro-nazi platform run by Nazi enablers, got it.
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🤦
Bring out the bad-faith arguments, lol.
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If you let Nazis congregate at your bar, congratulations, it's a Nazi bar now.
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Lemme guess, the room you wrote this comment in has an Iron Cross somewhere in it.
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This would be silly even if they didn’t moderate at all but they do. They don’t allow sex workers use their service. And we aren’t talking about “Nazis” as a code word for the far right. The complaint letter cited literal Nazis with swastika logos.
Plus, how grand are his delusions of grandeur if he thinks his fucking glorified email blast manager is the one true hope for free speech? Let the Nazis self-host an open source solution (like Ghost).
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They don’t allow sex workers use their service.
What about a nazi sex worker ?
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I guess exceptions could be made ...
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Do they not allow sex workers to use their service? Here's a sex worker who posts on Substack.
I believe keeping the ability for sex workers to post there intact is a good reason not to ban Nazis -- basically, deciding who are "good" posters and allowing only them leads to a steadily-expanding list of "bad" categories of people who need to get banned, with sex workers as an obvious additional early target.
If you're open to reading an article from Reason.com expanding on this take, which I partially agree with, there it is.
(Edit: Restructured so that more of the argument comes directly from me, as opposed to Reason.com)
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They don’t allow sexually explicit content. From their TOS:
We don’t allow porn or sexually exploitative content on Substack, including any depictions of sexual acts for the sole purpose of sexual gratification.
So, a porn star could write about the industry but couldn’t use it like “OnlyFans but blog” where she had a post and included some pictures for subscribers.
Which is fine. They’re the publisher. They can decide smut is a step too far. But don’t pretend to be some free speech martyr for publishing Nazi propaganda while banning showing a tit.
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Nazism doesn't deserve tolerance, any person who doesn't punch it in the face is equal or worse.
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Agreed. Unfortunate that many times this is met with some smug shit about "wanting echo chambers"
Not wanting a feed full of modern phrenology and a 20 page analysis about how this weeks 13 year old black kid getting murdered by the cops for looking at them wrong is "totally fine and actually should happen more" does NOT mean I "want echo chambers"
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Fists aren't a cure to intolerance. Probably doesn't hurt so knock
yourselfa nazi out. As long as force isn't being used to prevent open discussion and debate, it would be most unwise to drive dangerous ideologies underground where they can't be monitored and understood.-
You should read the tolerance paradox, to understand why you shouldn't be tolerant to intolerant people.
Why would someone would know myself? you idiot? I am not nazy or plan to tolerate them.
Those ideologies should be put in the mud where they belong, it is good to read history to understand why they are bad, and only stupid untolerant and racists edgelords are the ones that think that being nazi is cool.
Lol, you think you can monitor and understand those? lol. Just look how dangerous racist idiots are, for example the maga, who tried to overturn the election, in an attempt to inssurection, all of those idiots are traitors, and if they want to say that it is not that bad, then they are also as stupid as those inssurectionits.
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So they are a Nazi platform. End of.
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If you run a bar, and Nazis hang out in your bar, you run a Nazi bar
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So they're Nazis
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Space Nazis.....
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Subspace Nazis
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"Let's tolerate the people that say they want to genocide entire ethnic groups" Surely nothing bad is gonna happen /s
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So let me get this straight... They don't like Nazis, but Nazis not making money is worse than Nazis making money?
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No, people writing about sexy stuff and getting paid is worse than Nazis making money.
Edit: Being fair, the bible thumpers of old who established all the laws/morals which underlie most of the regulations today would take a big big problem with people writing sexy stuff. Nazis hating Jews would not be a big problem for them.
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Anything related to sex or women's sexuality that's very bad.
Letting Nazi's spread their hate, that's good.
Says every social media, internet company ever.
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Nazis making money and Substack not getting a cut of it is apparently worse than Nazis making money.
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That's the part that gets me. If it were just not removing content, well, I'd probably still complain but they'd have a coherent freedom of speech argument. But... they have to pay Nazis to make Nazi content and take a cut, otherwise it's censorship and that somehow helps the Nazis?
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Permanently Deleted
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Ah, I see we're using the SCOTUS definition of 'free speech' where money is speech.
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It’s 2023 and we have all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips but somehow people still have no idea what free speech is…
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Permanently Deleted
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Goodbye substack.
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I'd love to say that, but unfortunately journalists I respect, who are doing very excellent content that repudiates fascism, don't really have anywhere else to go. Radley Balko, for example, is a preeminent journalist on the topics of police brutality, law enforcement misdeeds, and failures of the criminal justice system. But WaPo didn't want to publish him any more, so where does he go?
I hope they find alternatives, but I'm not going to stop paying for journalism from people like Balko. I don't want to let white supremacists force any more epistemic closure.
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Almost as if Radley Balko's publisher deciding whether he was allowed to continue to speak anymore was a bad thing, and giving him a place where he can do it and earn a living and no one polices his content was a good thing.
(Edit: Woo hoo hoo judging by the downvotes y'all sure don't like it when it happens to one of your guys. Just to be clear, I don't really care all that much what happens to the literal Nazis. I only care a lot about this issue because I suspect that once you're done kicking off Nazis, you'll want to kick off the Joe Rogans and the Dave Chappelles and the COVID denialists and sooner or later some person will arrive with a list on which is someone you like. Like Radley Balko. And yet, somehow, that'll be totally different in your mind, not connected at all with the earlier people you were advocating for banning.)
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Tolerating Naziism and allowing it to use social tools to spread its hate is what makes it worse.
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Teach critical thinking skills as a pillar of the school curriculum and the population will be immunized preventing the spread.
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And teach the value of everyone being equal and their human rights, in school and at home, where it matters (both).
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Being a Nazi isn't a "view." It is a political movement guided by the principles of hate, violence, and genocide.
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And they are saying they are cool with that.
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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.
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Yeah, people don't seem to realize how insidious this shit is. Unfettered capitalism is allowing these fuckers to gain credibility and giving them a soapbox under the guise of "free speech."
The desire for profit above all else, combined with the fact that the last of the people alive during (and old enough to understand) WW2 dying off, has been allowing fascism to wrap its filthy tendrils around our society once again. Preventing these people from taking power needs to be our priority, but unfortunately, constantly having to fight against this shit impedes all other progress.
Free speech is not absolute. Fascists (and particularly ones that call themselves Nazis) have no place in modern society, and they should be given no quarter because we've seen what happens if we don't root them out.
This is not just a disagreement on policy, or a mere difference of opinion. These people literally want my friends dead.
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Nazism isn't an ideology, is a direct threat of violence. Anyone around a Nazi has a right to self defense rooted in natural law. That's why is fine to punch Nazis.
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McKenzie followed up later with a similar statement to the one today, saying “we don’t like or condone bigotry in any form.
Condone:
verb accept and allow (behavior that is considered morally wrong or offensive) to continue
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coded language for "we think Nazis have a point"
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"We don't like or condone bigotry in any form."
...But we are happy to financially support bigotry and directly profit from it.
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That's why having a bill of rights is such a dangerous thing.
Other countries have laws that allow for people to speak freely, but having "free speech" enshrined as a right, means you allow companies like this to promote hate speech but dust their hands off and claim, "We're just following the constitution" so they can profit from open racism and look clean while doing it.
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Facebook just shrugs off the rampant white supremacist content on its platform with great success, you can literally put up a profile photo with an "It's OK to be white" frame, or "white power" supplied by Facebook. I guess Substack thinks that if it works for Facebook it should be fine for them.
Incidentally Reddit banned me for posting pictures of Nazis on r/beholdthemasterrace, a subreddit for mocking white supremacy, when some Nazis went and complained to Reddit admins I was doing it. Reddit also sides with Nazis, they're just quieter about it.
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You probably got banned by reddit because other subreddits will nail you with bots for just posting to certain subs regardless of the context.
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No, I saw one of the Nazis I posted talking on Facebook about how he had reported me to Reddit admins. Well then don't have a swastika face tattoo.
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White powder 🌨️
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Is there some specific background to "it's okay to be white"? Without any context it does not sound obviously " white supremacist related to me, but it could be cultural, language or other.
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It's a Nazi talking point, one of their tropes is that white people are being eradicated everywhere because of multiculturalism and diversity, and that people are being taught it's not ok to just be white. The slogan originated from 4chan trolling but Nazis have absolutely adopted it.
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Okay fine, I'm never clicking on a substack link again.
And after say a grace period of about 6 months to move elsewhere, I'm going to assume anyone associating with the service is at best a nazi sympathiser
Go ahead, be a Nazi bar, I'm sure their money is worth it
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This is such a complicated feeling... On one hand, I agree. But on the other, we can't specifically pinpoint what censorship is valid and what isn't.
Edit: Obviously, I'm not considering Nazis in this thought experiment.
Edit 2: OH MY GOD PEOPLE! OF FUCKING COURSE WE SHOULD KEEP NAZIS OUT FFS! 😑
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It's indeed very difficult if not impossible to exactly and specifically pinpoint where the line is, it is however extremely easy to see when ideologies and behavior steps across it.
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But on the other, we can’t specifically pinpoint what censorship is valid and what isn’t.
I've seen this come up a few times. My response has been "luckily our platforms aren't run by an inscrutable god-machine nor an evil genie".
For non government cases like this, we don't need to solve the general case. We can just say "no Nazis allowed", and "no hating on queer folks " and so on as needed. Web forums have had rules for more than 30 years and it hasn't been a crisis.
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Is substack used in the EU? They might want to rethink their stance then...
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EU will start screaming at Substack for failure to filter out hate speech.
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In four years when the EU gets to it
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Nope, as far as I know only a couple of countries has explict laws againt Nazi (Germany obviously and Italy to some extend).
But in the end it will be the person to be persecuted if any crime is committed, not the medium.
Nobody in Italy think to punish or boycott a company just because the mafia is using and paying the company's products or services.-
Nope. Platforms have a responsibility to not host hate-speech and other illegal content, eg. remove it. Failure to do so is prosecutable.
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Italy is also a country that recently elected a descendant of Mussolini. Maybe they're not the best country to use as an example of the merits of letting evil outside operate freely.
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What does Substack plan to do with the profits that it makes from hosting Nazi content?
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Advertise in hopes of luring in more of that sweet sweet nazi fascism money.
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I'm just guessing here, but those Swiss bankers are still as fond of hiding nazis' ill-gotten gains for them as ever...
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On one hand, Substack is in it's rights and as a journalistic organization, they are in the right.
The issue is: Once you serve a Nazi in your bar, you become a Nazi bar. This is no longer a marginalized viewpoint you can ignore. Its actively recruiting and frightening. Inaction is enabling. Substack is going to become shitty, and fast. They will lose high engagement users, first when the ones who protested pile out for another platform and then quickly when the quality dips.
Also, their cavalier attitude will change when Stripe steps in.
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You can contact Stripe at the link to let them know about the company they are associating with.
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How is Stripe associated with Substack? (I'm out of the loop here)
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I an guessing they do their payment processingt
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I was too, but sounds like the TL;DR is they're the supporting infrastructure which substack uses:
Substack’s team built its service on Stripe’s infrastructure, which bypassed significant investment in engineering. By leaning on Stripe’s expertise, Substack could scale quickly and focus its energy on fulfilling its promise to writers. The company offers better services because it can continue to lean on Stripe and direct extra bandwidth toward customers.
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The issue is: Once you serve a Nazi in your bar, you become a Nazi bar.
So if a Nazi buy [a service] then the [service offerer] is a Nazi.
So every [service offerer] in the world is probably Nazi, since probably every [service offerer] in the world has at least a Nazi customer.
Interesting approach, now what we should do about all these Nazi [service offerer] ?
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this is enablement
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So they have no rules, any content is acceptable?
Anything less is "censorship" after all
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They probably have to follow laws and that's it.
Seems like fine platform, imo. Just let people communicate with the same amount of freedom they would have in real life.
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In real life, a restaurant can and will kick you out and ban you from the premises for wearing a swastika and saying you think minorities don't deserve to live.
Ergo, being kicked off a company's privately owned server for hate speech is EXACTLY the same amount of freedom they would have in real life.
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The same amount of freedom, but a much easier job to make money off of your bigotry! A site not afraid to help Nazis earn money! Sounds like a fine platform!
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No, it does not “make it worse”.
In fact, stamping out dissent and controlling people is incredibly effective. Ask any dictator.
Control is effective and necessary when it comes to people actively trying to damage society. No, I’m not supporting dictatorship or authoritarianism, just pointing out that control is effective.
Being a sect of destructive assholes doesn’t mean you should get a platform.
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“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
― Elie Wiesel
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Mckenzie needs to read that Reddit story about the bartender who kicked out a guy with the Third Reich eagle ensign on his shirt despite him quietly minding his own business. I really don't want Substack to "suddenly become a Nazi bar." I'm just a reader, but if I ever start a newsletter I may reconsider my platform. I am on a basic free plan for all Substack channels I read. I've thought about upgrading my subscription to some, but now I will hesitate.
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I'm guessing this story makes it "too late." If I were a Nazi (I'm not) , I'd instantly flock to any sight that welcomed me.
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Link to story?
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noticed that the story is now being summarized in dictionaries, haha
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Yeah well I'm unsubscribing and deleting bookmarks. I have enough stuff to read anyway
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Money is the only vote that matters. Avoid the Nazi bar. Don't give them ad revenue or search engine relevance (for what that's worth anymore).
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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.
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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?
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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.
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Another day of thanking
godthe devs for the decentralized Fediverse and Lemmy 🙏😔-
You and me both. Fuck Substack and fuck Nazis.
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What a stupid argument. Imagine replacing "nazis" with "pedophiles" in her answer
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Many Nazis were pedophiles.
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And they still are too. In fact for a few weeks I thought "let's go Brandon" was a coded pedophile thing because there's three sex offenders listed in the center of town and all three of them had "let's go Brandon" signs for months. I was like "geeze these kid fuckers are organizing a sign campaign, and who the fuck is Brandon?"
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Huh, I didn't know that but I'm not surprised. Morally bankrupt (or straight up evil) people doing morally wrong stuff...
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Not that yours is so much better. Imagine replacing "nazis" with "pro-choice", still sure the platform should remove the contents ?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Here's a Wired article featuring four good alternatives to Substack.
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Ha, one of the alternatives is Revue by Twitter for their platform, which I thought had been discontinued (article is dated 2022). But button seems to be a promising alternative that they describe.
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Yeah, Buttondown seem great. They can migrate you from Substack so people don't even need to re-subscribe which is pretty cool. They're also active on Mastodon and just added anti-Nazi terms to their ToS. They seem pretty responsive to the community in terms of adding suggested features.
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This is plainly irresponsible.
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Gen Z needs to understand the historical lesson that the Blues Brothers taught those before them. Illinois Nazis exist, and some days they demonstrate, as per their right to freedom of speech - but this is as much as an opportunity to humiliate them and openly critique the mindset as anyone else. Dark little underground communities flourish behind closed doors.
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Yeah. I feel like we see this shift in the ACLU. They used to represent some disgusting clients in order to fight for constitutional rights. Now a days the ACLU seems to struggle with protecting constitutional rights for the sake of constitutional rights, and instead is trying to do more politically liberal focused issues.
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Shining daylight onto them does not mean monetizing a platform for them.
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Tell me you are a fascist WO telling me you are a fascist.. 🤣🤣..
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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.
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And then people wonder why we're so scared of Facebook if the fediverse is "supposed to be open".
The answer is literally in front of you, people!
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Translated: McKenzie just wants the sweet money and is trying to gaslight us into thinking platforming nazis is ok.
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This tracks with my previous attempts at reporting that Sinfest guy. Posts hundreds of comics that blatantly break multiple official substack content guidelines and I get the effective equivalent of a promise for "action" combined with a dismissive eye roll. They completely ignored my follow-up email detailing the complete lack of action and the dozen or so new content guideline violations.
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“Yeah they’re nazis but hey, they bring the money in. Why should I ban them?”
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what''s "hey" for?
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"but hey" is a colloquial conjunction phrase in American English. It's usually used to indicate that the previous clause had a valid concern or made a good point, but the speaker is choosing to make light of it in order to disregard it despite knowing better, because they shortsightedly want the outcome described in the clause that follows.
Another example: "My doctor told me to watch my weight, but hey, it's Christmas and those cookies look fantastic."
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Jesus Christ censorship has become such a meaningless word now.
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Yeps. It went from government actions to some company not wanting a Nazi troll.
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we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.
Happy Opposite Day, everyone! 🥳
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I see literalnazis.com is available for cheap if anybody want to 302 that to substack.
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That's a tough choice when Tucker Carlson is opening his own streaming platform.
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Why just temporarily, go full 301.
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Optimism.
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Only thing I can recommend is finding their advertisers and letting them know what they're advertising on
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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."
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If a Nazi has a large subscription following than Substack would be directly profiting from Nazi content.
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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 animalsor more specifically justanimalsand 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.
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Oh yeah that's the classic. The interviewer describes himself as one of the targets, even, and that still doesn't make it real for this fuck.
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Yea I’m guessing it’s pretty obvious that it’s simply their shameless business model or they’ve made promises to someone in exchange for money to platform Nazis in the name of free speech.
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Cool... so they now facilitate and directly benefit from Nazi activity. Sounds great when you put it like that.
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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.
Are Musky and Hamish McKenzie’s friends because that sound like the same bullshit he would say. Also, hasn't deplatforming actually been shown to work?
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It's the only thing that works. Shouting Nazis into silence is the best early way to deal with them. Show up to protest in huge numbers, deplatform them, force them to scurry back into the shadows.
Most importantly of all, keep them from recruiting more.
Once these efforts fail, all you're left with is violence, and violence will come, because the Nazis love it.
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Have fun watching your website devolve into 4chan levels of degeneracy.
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This is the first time I heard of the platform and I intend to keep it that way
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I want them to explain how it makes things worse.
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"We would make less money, and that's worse than more money."
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Ugh, so disgusting. The only reason I use Substack is to follow Gregory Warner after NPR cancelled Rough Translation. I really hope he moves somewhere else.
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Submitted for good faith discussion: Substack shouldn’t decide what we read. The reason it caught my attention is that it's co-signed by Edward Snowden and Richard Dawkins, who evidently both have blogs there I never knew about.
I'm not sure how many of the people who decide to comment on these stories actually read up about them first, but I did, such as by actually reading the Atlantic article linked. I would personally feel very uncomfortable about voluntarily sharing a space with someone who unironically writes a post called "Vaccines Are Jew Witchcraftery". However, the Atlantic article also notes:
Experts on extremist communication, such Whitney Phillips, the University of Oregon journalism professor, caution that simply banning hate groups from a platform—even if sometimes necessary from a business standpoint—can end up redounding to the extremists’ benefit by making them seem like victims of an overweening censorship regime. “It feeds into this narrative of liberal censorship of conservatives,” Phillips told me, “even if the views in question are really extreme.”
Structurally this is where a comment would usually have a conclusion to reinforce a position, but I don't personally know what I support doing here.
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IDGAF if it feeds into the narrative. It also shuts down a recruitment pipeline. It reduces their reach. It makes the next generation less likely to continue the ideology. De-platforming is a powerful tool that should be reserved for only the most crucial fights, but the fight against Nazi is one of those fights.
The Nazis were already full-blown conspiracy theorists. EVERYTHING is spun to feed into their narrative. That ship has sailed.
A platform operator needs to AT MINIMUM demonetize the content and censure it, and is likely only being responsible if they ban it outright. If you aren't prepared to wade into the fraught, complex world of content moderation, don't run a content platform.
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Now I'm curious if anybody adds something about LGBTQ on there, if that's promptly removed.
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This reminds me of this comic:
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Money talks
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Money talks, fascism walks.
And people will still argue with you if you try to explain to them that there is no such thing as "grassroots fascism."
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They are right but it could hurt their bottom line if the non-nazis leave
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Ehhh, it's one of those things where I agree with the principle, but the principle fails. It's the so called tolerance paradox (which isn't actually a paradox at all, but that's tangential).
On principle, no company should be in the business of deciding what is and isn't acceptable "speech". That's simply not something we really want happening.
But then there's nazis and other outright insane bigots. But we still don't really want companies making that call, because they'll decide on the side of profit, period. If enough of the nazi types get enough power and money going, every single fucking company out there that isn't owned by a single person, or very small group of people that share the same ideals, is going to be deciding that it's the nazi bullshit that's the only acceptable speech.
This is something that has to come from the bottom to the top and be decided on a legal level first. We absolutely can ban nazi type bullshit if we want to. There's plenty of room for it to be pointed at as the incitement to violence that it is. There need to be very specific, very limited definitions to govern what is and isn't part of that
And the limitations have to be impossible to expand without starting all the way over with the kind of stringency it takes to amend the constitution.
That takes it out of the hands of corporations, and makes it very difficult to game. But it has to come from us, as a people first.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
In a 2020 letter from Substack leaders, including Best and McKenzie, the company wrote, “We just disagree with those who would seek to tightly constrain the bounds of acceptable discourse.”
The Atlantic also pointed out an episode of McKenzie’s podcast with a guest, Richard Hanania, who has published racist views under a pseudonym.
McKenzie does, however, cite another Substack author who describes its approach to extremism as one that is “working the best.” What it’s being compared to, or by what measure, is left up to the reader’s interpretation.
The original article contains 365 words, the summary contains 157 words. Saved 57%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
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Techbros tolerate Nazis.
You can run your own blog with WordPress. It even Federates.
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(transcribed from a series of tweets) - iamragesparkle
I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, "no. get out." And the dude next to me says, "hey i'm not doing anything, i'm a paying customer." and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, "out. now." and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed
Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, "you didn't see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them."
And i was like, ohok and he continues. "you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it's always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don't want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too. And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it's too late because they're entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.
And i was like, 'oh damn.' and he said "yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people."
And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven't forgotten that at all.
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Monetization of such content is questionable for sure, but I'm affirmative about what he says about the propagation of such extreme views. Simply being unaware about such things won't make them go away. People should know who they are and why they are so we can deal with them better. There's alot we can do better but can't do because of limited awareness and our own negative attitude to deal with them.
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this is absolute horseshit. there is a huge difference in giving platform to spread Nazi ideology and vigilance. to make it simple for you, one say "Nazi good" the other one says "Nazi bad".
there are examples plenty where not giving or actively purging hateful content and deplatforming reduces radicalization. substack is basically profiting from and encouraging domestic terrorism.
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This is not about difference of opinions. You're sending a very wrong message with that oversimplification. There is no such difference for Nazis.
And deplatforming don't always work the way we expect.
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And how have the ones we already know about been dealt with? What tangible benefit have we achieved by giving them a platform?
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I can ALMOST see his point... If you push them underground, you push them to find a space where nobody will challenge them, and they can grow stronger in that echo chamber.
Allowing them to be exposed to the light of day and fresh air makes their evil apparent to all and searchable.
And besides, "Punch a Nazi Day" just isn't the same without Nazis. :)
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The problem being we basically know that's not how it works.
If you push them underground, the main result is fewer Nazis. Intentionally platforming them helps them maintain a facade of normalcy that makes it WAY easier to recruit people into the organizations and further radicalize them. Not to mention the simple amplification effect of having a platform.
The idea that the underground Nazis are going to be a more distilled, pure, volatile form of Nazi SOUNDS theoretically sensible. But if that's your argument, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate it actually happens. And even if it sometimes does, if there's only 10 of them it barely matters.
The simplest solution, to shut down the recruitment pipeline, is also the correct choice for a platform operator to make.
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Thanks for putting it into words. I couldn't quite put my finger on what specifically felt wrong about this reasoning but you're on point.
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Nazis gotta work too
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Honestly? Unless I'm missing something, this sounds fine.
The internet I grew up on had Nazis, racists, Art Bell, UFO people, software pirates, and pornographers. The ACLU defended KKK rallies. Some of the people who were allowed a platform, that "everyone hated" and a lot of people wanted to censor, were people like Noam Chomsky who I liked hearing from.
I think there's a difference between "moderation" meaning "we're going to prevent Nazis from ruining our platform for people who don't want to hear from them" -- which, to me, sounds fine and in fact necessary in the current political climate -- and "moderation" meaning "if you hold the wrong sort of views you're not allowed to express them on my platform." The Nazi bar analogy, and defederating with toxic Lemmy instances, refers to the first situation. If I understand Substack's platform properly, it's the second: Only the people who want to follow the Nazis can see the Nazis. No? Am I wrong in that?
I'm fully in agreement with McKenzie that not allowing "wrong" views to be expressed and legitimately debated makes it harder to combat them, not easier. They're not gonna just evaporate because "everyone agrees they're bad" except the people who don't.
I realize this is probably a pretty unpopular view.
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Substack is not just allowing Nazis to use their product.
Substack is not just paying the hosting costs for Nazi essays.
They are paying the authors of those Nazi essays.
That goes way beyond "not censoring" Nazis.
It is active, monetary support.
Substack is a venue where you can make money by writing Nazi essays.
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I don't really understand Substack or fully grasp the issues involved; I'm just gonna say how I see it. I looked over their monetization page, and it kind of looks like the way it works is that the Nazi's readers (other Nazis, presumably) can sign up for a subscription, and Substack I assume takes a cut, and the rest goes to the Nazi. So it kind of sounds like the Nazis are paying each other, with a cut of that going to Substack. Do I have that right? It sounds like the Nazis (in the aggregate) are paying Substack. Nobody at Substack is raising money and using it to subsidize any Nazis. The Nazis are subsidizing hosting for random other publishers who don't have subscriptions. I think.
Irregardless of all that, I just have this general dislike of "demonitization" and the modern ethos of publishing on the internet. The demonitization on Youtube is totally weird. You can't say "suicide" or refer to sexual abuse or have gunshot sounds or say "fuck" in the first thirty seconds, except sometimes you can, and some content which is clearly harmful is allowed, and other stuff gets randomly taken away. Everyone lives under the constant threat of saying the wrong thing and suddenly getting, essentially, fired. One extremely popular Youtuber I liked left because he couldn't say what he wanted. John Stewart got "demonetized" from Apple+ just recently because he said something about China. The whole thing is stupid. Just let people say stuff. If it's illegal, take it down and prosecute them. If it's not, then let them say it. Yes I know the letter of the first amendment only applies to the government. I'm just saying I like the spirit, too. This culture's developed of policing what people can and can't say to a degree I find really off putting.
I get how we got here. You don't want people saying not to take the COVID vaccine or that the election was stolen, and producing real harm in the real world. But the landscape we've wound up at is stupid. Just let people be Nazis if they're Nazis. They're going to be Nazis, whether you allow them to or not. In fact, letting them participate in an open forum of ideas makes it more likely that they'll reform than chasing them away to a Nazi-only forum. If they're being toxic to other users, or doing something illegal in addition (which, to be fair, Nazis often are), then prosecute them for that behavior, not for being Nazis.
One of the really earthshattering moments for me on the early internet was reading posts from people who were "the enemy" in a shooting war that at the time I thought my country was "the good guys" of. It really blew my mind once I realized that Hamas is allowed to be on the internet, and North Korea, and Israel and The Daily Stormer and Hugo Chavez and Noam Chomsky. They're all allowed to have their web site. The modern internet is becoming more and more siloed, so that "I'm allowed to run a web server if I want" is less and less a determiner of whether that culture can continue. For better or worse, we're more than a little dependent now on whether big corporations who run the infrastructure want to let that chaotic "the bad guys are allowed to be here too" nature continue. They don't seem like they want to, and I don't like that.
Again, maybe this is an unpopular view, but that's how I see it.
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Let me guess, you're not the kind of person that the Nazis are extremely keen on putting in a gas chamber?
Because you're talking like this is just harmless, but unpopular opinions people have. Not a group of people who by definition think they are the master race and people who are "impure" need to be genocides.
And honestly I can't fucking stand spineless cunts like you that think we can't draw a reasonable line between Nazis calling for the end of entire races and for one of the worst atrocities in thr history of mankind to happen again, and Naom Chomsky. Putting "wrong" in quotation marks as if thinking genocidal racists being wrong is just a matter of opinion. And you have such little regard for the people that suffer at the hand of these scumbags that you think you can play devil's advocate as a fun little excessive for yourself.
So please take it extremely personally when I tell you to go fuck yourself.
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Where out of my message did you get that I was talking like it was harmless opinions? I get it that my tone was casual and I can apologize about that. Let me take it a little more seriously, then:
Let me guess, you’re not the kind of person that the Nazis are extremely keen on putting in a gas chamber?
Because you’re talking like this is just harmless, but unpopular opinions people have. Not a group of people who by definition think they are the master race and people who are “impure” need to be genocides.
I have a decent amount of Jewish ancestry and a Jewish name. I'm not practicing or anything. My parents had a friend who had the numbers tattooed on her arm.
Part of the reason I'm so casual about literal modern Nazis is that the modern threat of extremism isn't specific to Jewish people. Hispanic people are probably more at risk; under Trump, ICE detention centers became temporarily something that any informed person would describe as for-real concentration camps. I think if it does start to happen in a big way in the US, it will probably start with trans and Hispanic people and continue from there.
But every single one of us, Jewish or LGBT or Hispanic or just Democrat-supporting, is at risk under a second Trump presidency or whatever the next iteration after Trump is. That's not some abstract "I know your struggle" type of statement; I literally believe that Nazi-type violence and mass incarceration of "the enemy" are on the table according to a much wider swathe of the US populace than official-Nazi supporters.
And honestly I can’t fucking stand spineless cunts like you that think we can’t draw a reasonable line between Nazis calling for the end of entire races and for one of the worst atrocities in thr history of mankind to happen again, and Naom Chomsky. Putting “wrong” in quotation marks as if thinking genocidal racists being wrong is just a matter of opinion. And you have such little regard for the people that suffer at the hand of these scumbags that you think you can play devil’s advocate as a fun little excessive for yourself.
Okay, let me ask you, then. I have Facebook friends who make posts about getting themselves amped up for civil war if "the Democrats" keep it up. I would describe that as an atrocity. Dead is dead. A Jew in a concentration camp is just as dead as a Democrat who got shot by his neighbor because they got radicalized and decided today was the day (which has already happened, it's just on a tiny scale at this stage).
Most of the way I talk about this issue is colored by that. I do take the threat of extremism seriously, because it's already alive and well here, and growing. I think that figuring out what to do about the form in which it's most likely to become a horrifying reality is fairly important. If Jews wind up going into modern-day concentration camps, they won't be the first. They'll be an afterthought, long after Trump's political enemies and big segments of Hispanic (and maybe arab) people have gone in. If you're serious about the threat to Jewish people and want me to take it seriously (which is fair), can I ask you to be serious about the threat to all the rest of us?
What is your solution to the people who want to write "shoot the Democrats because they stole the election and took away your country"? People who say that every day and platforms that give them voice? My feeling on it is the same as what I said to you about Nazis. But what, according to you, should we do that will work? I am more concerned about that, as a present-day urgent issue, than about "put the Jews into gas chambers" propaganda, although that's clearly also horrifying.
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OK? But I'm going to think Substack is a hardened Nazi supporter whan I all of a sudden don't see Antifa openly talking about their plans for disposing of their Nazi opposition on their platform, which would be appropriate discussion in said situation. I'm also guessing that their coffers are now open to any and all well known terrorist organizations. Maybe we shouldn't of given corporations any power at all, they have proven time and time again to have absolutely no morals.
And I'm going right back to sleep, so if anyone wants to argue about free speech I'll give my opinion on that now. I draw the line at helping sick individuals try to organize the genocide of most of the people on this planet. I'm all fine for a mentally ill person (Nazi) to be yelling their propaganda from their soapbox in the town square, but letting and even helping the Nazis openly spread their well documented genocidal hate is too far for me.
Edit: I'm a little confused about the fast downvotes?
Maybe mentioning that Antifa (you know the opposite of Nazis) should be equally represented if your platform supports Nazis is considered a bad thing here on Lemmy, but that don't make much sense.
Maybe it's just the corporates paving the way for Facebooks infiltration and organized downfall of all their competition?
Maybe it's just the Nazis.
Then again it's probably just me having asd and speaking directly without a filter.
Don't worry though the Nazis have plans for people like me.
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Or maybe it's that you have no problem with Nazis using Substack, ostensibly a fundraising platform for writers, to earn money through Substack.
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That's the thing though, I do have a problem with Substack using their platform to support Nazis.
Edit: Maybe I'm ignorant of what Substack hosts already?
Are they already hosting other terrorist organizations?
Edit 2: I think I have been looking past my free speech statement, I just realized this is the first time I've actually advocated for a corporation censoring anyone's speech, that is definitely making me feel a little weird.
My dilemma here is I'm too old, I still remember my grandfather and many other WW2 Veterans telling me their stories, I don't want that to happen ever again, and right now I feel like I truly don't know what to do for the first time in my life.
So this subject is way bigger then Substack.
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I actually prefer this type of hands-off approach. I find it offensive that people would refuse to let me see things because they deem it too "bad" for me to deal with. I find it insulting anyone would stop me reading how to make meth or read Mein Kampf. I'm 40yo and it's pretty fucking difficult to offend me and to think I'm going to be driven to commit crime just by reading is offensive.
I don't need protecting from speech/information. I'm perfectly capable and confident in my own views to deal with bullshit of all types.
If you're incapable of dealing with it - then don't fucking read it.
Fact is the more you clamp down on stuff like this the more you drive people into the shadows. 4chan and the darkweb become havens of 'victimhood' where they can spout their bullshit and create terrorists. When you prohibit information/speech you give it power.
In high school it was common for everyone to hunt for the Anarchists/Jolly Roger Cookbook. I imagine there's kids now who see it as a challenge to get hold of it and terrorist manuals - not because they want to blow shit up, but because it's taboo!
Same with drugs - don't pick and eat that mushroom. Don't burn that plant. Anyone with 0.1% of curiosity will ask "why?" and do it because they want to know why it's prohibited.
Porn is another example. The more you lock it down the more people will thirst for it.
Open it all up to the bright light of day. Show it up for all it's naked stupidity.
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Substack bans pornography but allows Nazis.
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fascinated that you think it would somehow be harder for you to go out and find nazis if substack weren't hosting and paying them. it will always be easy to find and read Nazi content. the reason substack matters is that the platform helps THEM find YOU, or a suggestible journalist, or a suggestible politician, etc. you are not the protagonist here
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Agreed. I actually had come back to this topic specifically to make this exact point, which for all the time I'd spent on this at this point I feel like I hadn't said.
People are adults, generally speaking. It's weird to say that you can't have a newsletter that has a literal swastika on it, because people will be able to read it but unable to realize that what it's saying is dangerous violence. Apparently we have to have someone "in charge" of making sure only the good stuff is allowed to be published, and keeping away the bad stuff, so people won't be influenced by bad stuff. This is a weird viewpoint. It's one the founding fathers were not at all in agreement with.
Personally, I do think that there's a place for organized opposition to slick internet propaganda which pulls people down the right-wing rabbit hole, because that's a huge problem right now. I don't actually know what that opposition looks like, and I can definitely see a place for banning certain behaviors (bot accounts, funded troll operations, disguising the source of a message) that people might class as "free speech," or adding counterbalancing "free speech" in kind to misleading messages (Twitter's "community notes" are actually a pretty good way of combating it for example). But simply knee-jerking that we have to find the people who are wrong, and ban them, because if we let people say wrong stuff then other people will read it and become wrong, is a very childish way to look at people who consume media on the internet.
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Good for them. I'm all for allowing people make their own choices about what kind of content they want to see instead of a corporation/government deciding for them.
I can't think of a single thing we've succesfully gotten rid of by banning it. I however can think of several examples where it has had an opposite effect.
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Nazi Germany. We banned the fuck out of them and it worked out great until people started to forget why.
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It all depends on the nature and goals of the platform.
It's one thing to create a platform for positivity and brave new world (in a good sense). It's good we have those, and this probably should be the approach of mainstream media.
It's another to create a truly free speech platform. You can't claim free speech and then ideologically ban someone, even if that's someone bad. And you should have such venues - for among 9 terrible ideas (like Nazism) lies one that is underappreciated and misunderstood, and wrongly considered to be bad. Feminism was considered to be bad. LGBT people were considered to be bad etc. etc. And if you start banning some ideas, it leaves you with carte blanche to ban everyone you don't like, including people who actually promote healthy and positive ideas and values, but are misunderstood.
Only leaving the first option means starting a circlejerk where no good new idea has a chance to flourish.
As per Nazis, homophobes and other people with terrible ideas - you really can't overcome it by just pulling it under the rug. We need to develop patience and advance our rhetorics to counter those, and to quickly seed that grain of truth from which all their misconceptions get to shatter. That's literally the only way to combat ideology - by exposing how deeply wrong and flawed it is, and providing arguments.
Will there be people with no reason following such ideologies out of spite and emotion? Sure. But by stepping against them on an equal footing, we can show the rest how stupid their arguments are, rven on a dedicated free speech platform.
Because Nazism is not bad simply because we decided it to be so. It is a faulty ideology meant to distract people from real sources of their struggle while expending millions of lives in the process.
It removes critical understanding of economic processes by the masses, fooling them into believing the issues are caused by some nation and not their own elites - something that is well-researched and obvious to almost every other modern individual.
In order to retain people's decisiveness amongst deep economic crisis directly caused by application of such ideology (due to rampant expropriation, paranoid protectionism, economic mismanagement and removal of active economic participants), Nazi government always needs to wage a war - this way it can blame its faults on its enemies. And war inevitably comes with millions of deaths, deaths directly attributed to the ideology cause it can't run without them.
Finally, it's an ideology based on hate to a group with an immutable property - it ignores the differences all of us have and tries to attribute a certain property to an entire nation - something we know isn't true - and then exterminate people based on what is known to be wrong association.
No matter how you look at it, under any rational look, Nazism is just plain stupid, and in its stupidity it produces extreme and unnecessary suffering.
With all that being said, again, I don't think we should make platforms like Substack mainstream and we should moderate general-topic places to exclude Nazis and other harmful actors. But we sure as hell need them to be present.
Because the only thing worse than Nazis allowed to influence us is the tyranny of subjective good.
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Banning nazis is not a slippery slope.
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It is when people start agreeing with what is said.
they love what I say just hate the word nazi
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I'll just give an example.
Recently, when discussing defederated instances, I've seen an interesting picture: people cheered defederating instances of Nazis and...pedophiles.
An average person would see no issue here. Right, one more terrible group banned! Take those perverts down! But there's a catch that I discovered quite a while ago, and it's a rabbit hole like no other.
- First, pedophile is not a child molester. We equate the two wrongly all the time, and those words became synonymous.
- Second, pedophilia is an immutable trait; unlike with Nazis, no one can decide to stop being one.
- Third, many of the pedophile instances, including those massively banned, actually feature anti-contact pedophiles, i.e. those specifically dedicated to never ever touch or interact with a child in any inappropriate way; said instances also generally prohibit any forms of child sexual imagery or only allow fictional drawings. And early research suggests it actually helps them. We brought up some reads and scientific articles on the matter throughout discussion. Conclusion: there are uncertainties, but it seems to work in protecting kids and reducing suicide rates.
And when you see something like that, you clearly understand that there's a lot of things in the world people still heavily misunderstand, while feeling certain about the position they didn't have 5 minutes to research on, and that people are already on the slippery slope, banning groups they didn't have time and effort to comprehend. And there's a lot more of that than just pedophiles, this is just a very bright example that will probably make most of those reading this uncomfortable and will illustrate the concept best.
Also, I'm full aware that most people will likely choose to downvote this, not comment anything and end up thinking I support child molesters (hell no, if you support child molestation go get some mental health asap, fucking kids is very bad)
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Not banning a group of people that is intolerant and promotes killing people they don't like is totally a good idea. That worked well before....
If anyone can't tell, my first paragraph is sarcastic.
I am aware people outside of Europe and Rwanda are absolutist on free speech but that I think it is because they have not experienced first hand what it's like when hate speech becomes unbridled. It's a classical liberal value to promote free speech at all cost, believing that good ideas will filter out from a stream of bad ones because they believe humans are inherently rational. Well, for many in Germany and Rwanda before, it made sense for them to kill "others" because those at the top said so. I am not going to call old school liberals naive, because of course they did not foresee free speech morphing into hate speech and then making unspeakably evil action into reality centuries later.
As a side note, the US actually thought about electronically interfering a Rwandan-government run radio station that propagates dehumanisation of Tutsis, but the US opted not to out of principle for freedom of speech. That radio station contributed to fomenting hate that led to the Rwandan genocide.
So, no-- an intolerant being intolerant has no place in society. Giving the intolerant platform will eventually stamp down others and ultimately free speech and liberty. Banning Nazis in a platform is no brainer. Like, after all they have done, why on earth would the intolerant be tolerated?
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I see your point, and this is exactly why I say this shouldn't happen on mainstream media - this should always be part of platforms one goes to in look for controversies.
We should not allow nor tolerate Nazism or other things like that on mainstream Lemmy instances, for example.
However, we have to set some place for everyone to have a voice. In many places, me calling for communism, for example, will be met with an instant permaban, with people saying I advocate gulags and bloody wars (I do not). And I always wish to have a place to voice my ideas, because I think they're right, regardless of the sentiment that may push mainstream platforms one direction or the other. But that means you'll end up needing a platform allowing everyone - and it should exist as well.
Those are just two systems, and both are necessary for us to prosper.
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Welp. On my way to Substack and peek in over there.
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I don't think anyone here is shocked that you want to help Nazis make money.
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