Substack has missed the point. Preventing Nazis from spewing venomous hate speech is not censorship. This is not a conversation about free speech – and framing it as such is intellectually lazy and just plain wrong.
Nazism is an evil, genocidal ideology that killed 6 million Jews and between 35 million and 60 million people in World War 2.
The evil man espousing it, Adolf Hitler, caused a brutal war that dragged the whole world into it. It not only decimated Europe for decades but caused economic destruction that had decades-long effects for hundreds of millions of people around the world.
I lost family members in the concentration camps. My grandfather was the only survivor of his 11 siblings – because he left Latvia as a teenager to work in South Africa.
Nazism isn’t some benign ideology that you can debate over a flat white or at a dinner party. It is a ruthless, destructive, hate-filled worldview that Aryans were superior human beings and everyone else is an “untermensch” (sub-human).
In a word, Nazism is evil.
Tolerating evil can never be defended. Just ask “the actual truth” Elon Musk how that’s working out for him.
Read more: Musk’s expletive rant at advertisers just finished off Twitter
“We don’t like Nazis either”
Substack has made the fatal decision – give it a few months, and the obituaries will flow – to defend the indefensible.
After the newsletter service was shown to be a home for such extremism in a The Atlantic article in November, Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie used all the usual excuses for not taking a moral stand against it – applying the ludicrous justification that no “incitements to violence” were actually made.
“We don’t think that censorship (including through demonetising publications) makes the problem go away – in fact, it makes it worse,” he wrote. “We believe that supporting individual rights and civil liberties while subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power.”
He prefaced it with: “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.”
In short: it’s not our problem. People are just like that.
Neo-Khmer Rouge?
It’s funny how you never hear similar arguments being made about other genocidal ideologies like Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge or the Rohingya genocide or the Darfur genocide. Wikipedia has a long list of genocides for social media platforms to brush up on.
The reason platforms tolerate neo-Nazis is because they’re rich and stupid and easily outraged. Outrage brings traffic and eyeballs for advertising.
Remember Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s idiotic and indefensible comment in 2018 that Holocaust denialists aren’t “intentionally getting it wrong”.
Really? Have you ever met a neo-Nazi who is not “intentionally” denying the wholesale, inhumane slaughter of 6 million people for the simple fact that they were born Jewish?
It’s worth reading Zuckerberg’s comments in full to respected technology journalist Kara Swisher: “I’m Jewish, and there’s a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened. I find that deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong”.
In short: these nutters are great for outrage and advertising dollars – so let’s pretend it’s just “unintentional”.
Moral vacuum
Substack’s lack of moral backbone has led to a writers’ backlash, with some having left the platform, which takes a 10% cut of subscription revenue from each newsletter.
Well-known tech journalist Casey Newton is the latest – and most high-profile – to draw attention to the moral vacuum at the newsletter service.
“Rolling out a welcome mat for Nazis is, to put it mildly, inconsistent with our values here at Platformer,” wrote Newton, whose Platformer newsletter is essential reading for Silicon Valley. “It is our hope that Substack will reverse course and remove all pro-Nazi material under its existing anti-hate policies. If it chooses not to, we will plan to leave the platform.”
If Newton, who also co-hosts a New York Times podcast, leaves, this “alone could represent six figures of revenue” that Substack could lose, according to The Guardian.
Newton generously thinks Substack will change its tune, and it may, but the damage has been done. You can’t pretend that two-thirds of the Jewish population in Europe was wiped out and that celebrating it is somehow morally acceptable. Kristallnacht was not “intentionally getting it wrong”.
Tolerating evil can never be defended.