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.”
I’m looking. Is something supposed to stand out about Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, New Zealand, Sweden, and the UK?
Actually, yes. In the UK people (including Jewish people) are being arrested and jailed for speaking out against Israeli naziism and genocide as inciting “hate.”
That example is literally EXACTLY why people, myself included, believe that the censoring of certain types of speech needs to remain exclusively a private enterprise.
That’s an interesting point. On one hand Israel is the way it is because right wing nationalism has been normalized through open and free speech in the US. But Israel is also where it is because of the conflation of the meaning of antisemitism shutting down anyone challenging it. Though, I am seeing that conflation being properly challenged more so now than ever before but it’s obviously not fast enough. It’s probably time to implement looking more at collective actions more than words within governmental policy writing. As in mass killings = bad. I wish humans didn’t suck.
There is real time censorship present anywhere in europe? Nowhere near. We have “you have to act within certain time” laws when content gets flaged, that’s all. You could argue forcing DNS resolvers to block certain domains is censorhip though. Look at China. Talk bad about politics in your private chats with your mates, i’m sure your censorship dream will do you and your family well! Heck even talking about Winnie poh is “hate” or was this not true?
Again, demonitize them as you want. But censorship just leads to the groups isolating more and more from the world.
Just look at the beliefs of people witch a member of cults (or religions if you want) - thousands of people which are explicitly denied via rules to gather knowledge in the internet (looking at you Mormons). I’d like to call that psychological censorship - it aims for the same goal in a way but I get way to off topic