30 Comments

I am most interested in hearing substack’s response. To be blunt, I will not continue to use a tool that gives aid or assistance to Nazis or white supremacists.

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No, Substack doesn’t have a “nazi problem,” and the marketplace of ideas is working. Substack is a wonderful platform that allows everyone to express their viewpoints, even the ones that are censored on other social media platforms. Let’s not lose that by “fixing” what’s not broken.

As I previously explained, Katz’s article is poorly substantiated: https://substack.com/@tianwen/note/c-44440339.

For instance, Katz writes:

> One overtly Nazi newsletter called The Tribalist recently published a fawning interview with Billy Roper, a former skinhead who led the most prominent American neo-Nazi organization in the 1990s.

This is the post: https://thetribalist.substack.com/p/billy-roper-interview.

The post hasn’t received any comments or “likes” and I’m the only one to have “restacked” it.

To me, this means the post has had little impact on people. The handful of neo nazis writers on Substack are barely read and have little impact. That’s great, and shouldn’t surprise anyone who has spent any meaningful amount of time here — as someone else has written, Twitter is a “tavern” and Substack is a “library.”

To me this shows that the “marketplace of ideas,” as embodied by Substack, is working — readers are naturally gravitating towards high quality discourse, not nazi rhetoric.

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Well said and a great comment!

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As a publisher commited to free expression and intellectual pursuits, where do you draw the bright line between what is acceptable for publication and that which is not?

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This isn't a public utility. Those kicked off of this platform have plenty of other places to proselytize their ideas. But this comment that I deleted? It's on the other side of the line: https://substack.com/@herecomeschina/note/c-45413964?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=rjjdx

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I’m not arguing that Substack can or cannot keep who they care to. As others have pointed out, it’s a private company. But it does seem a fair question to ask: where’s the line between publishable political speech/writing and that which is not? The example in your reply seems clearly antisemitic as well as just plain nuts. But, and it’s a big but, how do we know when to ban crazy talk and when not to? Most attempts to regulate ‘hate speech’ have failed for good reasons. How do we know what is protected speech?

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Can you provide examples of how efforts by private corporations to regulate hate speech on their platforms have failed?

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This is a good question, and there is a good answer to it:

It is impossible to draw such a line.

Any line one draws simply takes the current majority view of acceptable/unacceptable thought (the outer edges of the Overton Window) and pretends that this majority view will never *itself* be abhorrently, destructively, murderously wrong.

But obviously the majority has been this wrong and will continue to be, again and again.

This is why all major social progress (ending slavery, marriage rights, voting rights for women) has started by thinking and saying something completely outside the realm of acceptable debate.

There are many progressive views that *right now* are getting people censored, fired, etc. This is not hypothetical at all. Progressives calling for censorship are hurting some of the causes they care about the most, right now.

Substack is completely right to protect those important causes (now and in the future) by sticking to well-defined guidelines like incitement, which have been established over decades by lawmakers and jurisprudence operating within representative democracy, not by the whims of a startup founder.

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Facebook, Twitter? Aren’t these examples where speech moderation went off the rails?

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No, I don't think so. Content moderation is hard, and I'm not going to say that they handled it perfectly. But prior to Musk's takeover of Twitter both sites had moved down the learning curve in how to do it.

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Hmmm...the work that Taibi, Weiss, et al with the so called Twitter files doesn’t leave me confident in either content moderation or social media’s ability to resist govt censorship/propaganda. You may think this is a flip response but it’s not. Why can’t you just ignore the so-called Nazi’s? There’s a *lot* of crazy stuff -- writing, comments, garbage on the left and right. There’s also just a lot of crazy stuff. I recognize there are criminal lines including pedophilia and other sex related material that the hosts bar.

Unlike many (apparently), I spend as much if not more time reading people whose views and speech I find stupid/deplorable/wrong. But I find myself surprised less often than friends and colleagues who attend to the world through narrower apertures.

Last, then I’ll shut up, who are the “Nazis?” Are we talking about right wing white supremacy types? Real Nazis? Hamas supporters? Socialists who are ardent nationalists? There aren’t any real Nazis showing up in my Substack feed. There are a lot of bone heads making dumb comments but I digress. Keep up the good fight. I’ll keep busting your balls for free(er) speech. ;)

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This is a private network. The managers can draw the line wherever they please. Just as you can draw the line as to who you invite to your home or birthday party. The First Amendment covers PUBLIC speech so long as it does not incite immediate and specific danger. It in no way obligates private, non-public, entities from publishing any trash offered up.

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Yes, but this oft-repeated point is misleading. The First Amendment is just one rule in one particular country. But freedom of expression—as a value and practice—came before the First Amendment and is much broader. Democracy depends not mainly on the law, but on the actual *value and practice* of freedom of expression. The law is worthless paper if there isn't a corresponding value the public cares about. Censorship on a large privately-owned platform may not be a First Amendment violation, but it certainly is a violation of the spirit and value of freedom of expression. So is calling for it.

The thing that matters for democracy is our mutual commitment to tolerate ideas we find abhorrent. Without it, how is democracy even supposed to work? How are we supposed to govern with people we disagree with, if we can't trust them to permit our disagreement, and they can't trust us to permit theirs? When we call for censorship, on the strict technicality that the First Amendment allows it, we erode the basic tolerance that makes democracy work. One of the things I find the most abhorrent about totalitarian movements (like Nazis) is their rejection of this commitment to mutual tolerance. But as soon as we pull the same move on them we show our (professed) tolerance to be just a convenient lie, only extended to people we perceive as already sufficiently on our side. This unforced error hands Nazis a win. "You see? Democracy is fake," they say, to convert more sympathizers.

Censoring a newsletter on Substack isn't a First Amendment violation, but neither is censoring a newsletter in China. (Neither China nor Substack are subject to the First Amendment!) But the fact that China's laws permit censorship obviously doesn't mean that censorship in China is okay. Nor is it okay on Substack, for the same reasons.

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Why are you guys using copy pasta?

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I don't like the term Nazi being thrown around. It should be reserved for the OG real Nazis of the 1920s-1940s. If someone's ideology today is sufficiently similar then neo-Nazi please.

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Add me to the protesters. Unbelievable!

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“It is a poor service to the memory of the victims of the holocaust to adopt a central doctrine of their murderers.” -- Noam Chomsky

If you in any way, for any reason, agree with or support this "Substackers Against Nazis" letter, I urge you to please take some time to read through the article I have linked with an open mind.

Please. As a personal favor ;)

I've been told it is... a tad long haha, but I have little doubt that if someone can find the time to pen this letter, contribute to this movement, or go hunting down Nazis on Substack, then they:

A) clearly are passionate enough about this topic to want to learn as much as possible

B) let's be honest, have a weeeee bit of extra time on their hands haha. Obviously, I do too.

I have no doubt some of you have aligned yourself with this initiative out of the best of intentions. As such any opposition may seem to be solely the protestations of nefarious Nazis. However, I assure you that this is not the case, and many great Jewish minds have sacrificed greatly to oppose what you are attempting here as well. There is a lot more to discuss, but that is why I wrote an entire article about it :) Enjoy, and God bless.

https://honestlyre.substack.com/p/enlightened-gatekeeping-and-elon-756

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Thanks Dan. I have allied my own substack with this needed effort.

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I rarely post but wanted to say thank you for this.

It has, perhaps not coincidentally, proven to be useful in identifying nazi accounts as they can’t help but respond to it.

They can’t help but out themselves.

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(Corrected for wrong link) Here is the transcript of Nilay Patel's interview of Chris Best on the subject of Nazis on Substack:

https://www.theverge.com/23681875/substack-notes-twitter-elon-musk-content-moderation-free-speech

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Right on, Dan!

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Do you have an alternative host picked out? Because I'd bet money that Substack will respond to this the same way they responded to Jude Doyle and Grace Lavery.

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If you don't like Substack, leave. Go to your platforms.

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Hi! I've been trying to co-sign this letter for weeks but haven't been able to.

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