- 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.”
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:
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.
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.
This might blow your mind a little bit: depilatform them. Hatespeech is hatescppech, a call to violence is a call to violence. Neither is protected by your first amendment, and both should be completely and utterly illegal.
This isn’t some difficult mystery to figure out. There’s no catch 22 or irreconcilable conflict of rights going on here. Its pretty cut and dry. Anyone whether they’re a traditional nazi, neo nazi, maga nazi does not have the right to call for peoples deaths or for violence against them.
Germany has had restriction on Nazis for a long time now. And hasn’t had issues with censoring non-nazi speech. So why can’t your country?
And also, if you allow for Nazi speech, how far do you take it? do you let them draw up plans and organise gangs to hunt down undesirables? Only intervening when the physical violence actually starts?
If you do not work to prevent atrocities, and turn a blind eye to those trying to commit them then you are in fact tacitly complicit in those atrocities.
A lot of the thinking on things like free speech by the founding fathers was that it wasn’t like a “grant” of something the government is letting you do. It’s an acknowledgement of some simple physical realities of what thinking beings are going to do whether you “let them” or not. Nazis are going to talk to other Nazis. If you come into their Nazi place saying “whoa whoa whoa you can’t say that!”, they’re not going to just suddenly go, oh, my bad, you’re right, we won’t say that anymore. You might hate that the KKK is “allowed to exist” when their whole thing is violence, torture, basically organized evil. But, the government isn’t “allowing them to exist” in the same way it might let someone have a driver’s license. It’s more just that people good or bad are going to do certain things, and the government is acknowledging the reality.
I would actually put some other things in this list, sex work and drugs among them. For pretty much exactly the same reasons. I think as a matter of the fundamentals of law, they should be sort of in a “can’t be illegal” list, because it’s so weird and invasive to people’s liberty to even try.
The US had robust protections on speech by the KKK and the American Nazi party, before during and after World War 2. In Germany, before and after the war, it’s legal for the government to allow and forbid particular political parties, as they currently do with the Nazis. Fair enough. Which country was it that actually had a holocaust again? Why didn’t the Nazis do it in the US, where they had such robust protections on their ability to speak and organize?
So you can punish speech advocating for violence. It’s a tricky thing, because people will just speak in code, which is now happening all over the place. (I see that on Facebook – people will say, I can’t really say what I want to have happen, but we all know what the answer is. Things like that.) But yes, if someone says we have to kill the Jews, I think that should be illegal, whether or not they’re a Nazi. Talking to an associate to plan a robbery is illegal, publishing a newsletter planning a new holocaust is illegal. Saying the holocaust is a lie, I think should be legal. Saying Hitler was right, I think should be legal. That’s where I would draw the line.
It sounds – tell me if I’m wrong – like you think that I just don’t care about hate speech, or I don’t see why it might be a problem, or it’s not worth worrying about. Absolutely it’s a problem. On all this urgency you’re expressing, I 100% agree with you. I am saying that banning it makes that problem worse. Basically, my opposition to banning hate speech is because I don’t want it to “win.” The original internet (like Usenet era), the one I talked about way up there in my original comment, didn’t have anywhere near the level of embittered extremism that we see now. I think that’s because everyone was on the same network. Someone could go on and say “Hitler was right” and people pile on to tell that person why they were wrong. But you could say whatever you wanted. It’s like people who go to college and get less racist because they’re thrown into this big multicultural situation. There will still be racist people, yes. But things will be much worse, and people will be a lot less honest with you about their racist views, if the instant some person says something racist the college administation tells them they’re not welcome on campus anymore and they have to find a new society to be a part of that isn’t so multicultural. They get isolated and fester and find like-minded people to fester with. Which is what’s happening now on the internet.
I am sorry for talking so long; this is just important to me. The one last thing I’ll say – one main reason I’m so concerned about this is that I have a feeling that it won’t stop at Nazis; that as soon as Nazis are deplatformed they’ll start coming for the Joe Rogans and the Dave Chappelles on Substack, someone who is far from calling from a holocaust, but just has said something that someone decided isn’t allowed. Literal Nazis tend to call for genuine crimes, and tend to not attract as many followers as the kill-the-Democrats-oho-I-didn’t-mean-it-literally-wink crowd, so they’re easier to deal with. My main concerns are, please don’t try to censor the non-Nazis, and please what the fuck do we do about the new brand of extremists. I can’t literally agree with you that we should deplatform all my Facebook friends who call for violence in coded ways. I won’t claim to know what’s the right thing to do about this new type of propaganda but that doesn’t seem like the answer.