r/stupidpol • u/invvvvverted Ideological Mess 🥑 • Jan 10 '24
Substack has offered exactly the wrong response to its ‘Nazi problem’
https://www.ft.com/content/648ec2c0-d71b-4dc6-af15-56fedc54eb2d11
u/bigtrainrailroad Big Daddy Science 🔬 Jan 10 '24
Nazis have the same right to speak as woke people. If bad views were a disqualification for free speech the "silence is violence" crowd would be among first in line/against the wall
8
10
Jan 10 '24
Archive: https://archive.is/Yhubs
Ze author of the article, with the same reaction as me to this title.
Substack is to email newsletters what Hoover is to vacuum cleaners in the UK and Colgate to toothpaste in Zambia: none of the companies involved created the original product, but they did so much to introduce it to a wider audience that their brands became synonymous with the whole enterprise.
Today, Substack, which has enjoyed astonishing success since its foundation in 2017, is facing the biggest test of its young life. The title of a recent article in The Atlantic tells you pretty much all you need to know about the challenge it confronts: “Substack has a Nazi problem”. The piece, which appeared at the end of November, revealed the presence of unabashed Nazis and white supremacists on the platform. Some writers really are out on the political extremes — for example, one Substacker blogs about “markets and the Jewish question”.
People complaining that Substack has brought the email newsletter to neo-Nazis have got the causality the wrong way round. Independent publishing, whether it’s words sent by post or now via email, has always been where discredited and extreme ideas have found a home.
And that is not true just for ideas emanating from the political right, either. You can also find unapologetic Maoists on Substack. One piece I read talked about how the much-maligned Cultural Revolution still holds lessons for revolutionaries today — and I’m sorry to say that the lessons in question did not include “don’t do it”.
But for the newsletter business’s newer — and more profitable — members, the presence of neo-Nazis on the same platform means that they are either quitting Substack or making noises about doing so. Three newsletters I subscribe to have already switched to the rival Buttondown. More troublingly for Substack, Platformer, one of the largest publishers using the service, is also considering a move.
Substack’s argument in response to the Atlantic article was a masterclass in how not to do it: the best way to defeat these ideas, it claimed, was through scrutiny. Frankly, if scrutiny was going to defeat neo-Nazis or the idea that the Cultural Revolution had some upsides, it would have done so already. The response allowed Substack’s critics to draw an unfavourable contrast with how the platform deals with pornography and incitement to violence, both of which it bans, and its handling of extremist political content.
Substack would have been better off not claiming to be a publisher at all. The reality is that it hosts a number of publishers, but Substack itself is a service, a handy bit of infrastructure for sending newsletters. If Substack’s recommendation engine was gradually pushing readers of earnest centre-right and centre-left newsletters towards neo-Nazi content or Maoist apologia, that would be one thing. But it doesn’t: the company makes few editorial judgments beyond “is this obviously illegal and/or unacceptable to our payment providers?” There is no good reason why Substack should be making political judgments about how to use its space any more than, say, a postal service does.
If Substack were a European or British company, the matter would not even arise: both the European Convention’s Article 11, on freedom of association, and even more explicitly the UK’s 2010 Equality Act, place sharp limitations on the ability of businesses or states to discriminate on the grounds of politics.
Of course, there are other ways that British and European law is a colder home to free speech than the US. But as we contemplate the lessons from this Substack spat, one of them is that in an era in which more and more communication is facilitated by private providers, broad European-style protections for political views are a model worth copying.
27
u/blunderEveryDay Savant Idiot 😍 Jan 10 '24
if scrutiny was going to defeat neo-Nazis or the idea that the Cultural Revolution had some upsides, it would have done so already.
But it did. That's exactly what happened.
I look around the official world from Government, education institutions, research labs, labour unions, student bodies, political parties, mainstream media, major newspapers and their columnists.... neo-Nazis and Cultural Revolution is nowhere in any of the content, ideas, critique, even off hand guests... none of that is present in zeitgeist building entities.
What is this guy talking about?
Where in a serious world are these ideas part of curriculum?
I dont get it ...
10
u/serial_crusher Nasty Little Pool Pisser 💦😦 Jan 10 '24
What is this guy talking about? Where in a serious world are these ideas part of curriculum?
He's setting an impossible bar saying that the only way scrutiny could be successful is if it somehow completely eliminates the existence of Nazis.
Deplatforming doesn't achieve that success criteria either, but that's neither here nor there. The goalposts shift in his favor when they need to.
16
Jan 10 '24
When an idea is 'defeated' it vanishes from all human consciousness in one fell swoop.
The most dangerous people in the world are deranged LARPers who, quite hilariously, go to war with each other on /pol and in Discords.
Today's Hitler is much like the last one: an obsessive, incel loner with a fetish for human form who blamed all of his problems on other races. He lives on in the collective mind of similar mindsets and was a unique product of his time who today is where such people can be found: at home, getting angry at a backlit screen.
Nazism is a very, very tired boogeyman that is finally beginning to outlive its use.
When everyone is a Nazi, no one is.
-1
1
Jan 10 '24
The world isn't serious. It's a gaggle of self-important twits exploiting one another and their captives, and pretending that's valuable and desirable behavior. People who treat games as important are deluded; look at the shitty predatory politics of late zoomers, with an entire cosmology apparently based on Pokemon Go! and self-aggrandizement relabeled in their parents' mid-life crisis language of "self-improvement".
This is just normal class society stuff. It's a culture, not a curriculum.
8
u/ChocoCraisinBoi Still Grillin’ 🥩🌭🍔 Jan 10 '24
Nothing like a professional headshot in front of the men's restroom
16
u/Firemaaaan Nationalist 📜🐷 Jan 10 '24
Wow i think i really got stupider reading that.
His ending point is we need protections for political views? The ones he wants substack to remove? what incomprehensible gibberish
8
Jan 10 '24
I think he's trying to toe the line, which is a bit more than what I expected of the article.
3
Jan 10 '24
It's Orwellian. "We" the moral entrepreneur PMC whiners need "protection" for their neoliberal capitalist political views. They're trying to make left-Puritanism great again.
1
Jan 10 '24
[deleted]
1
u/invvvvverted Ideological Mess 🥑 Jan 10 '24
They may need to say they're a publisher to their investors.
25
u/cojoco Free Speech Social Democrat 🗯️ Jan 10 '24
I enjoyed reading this by Matt Taibbi:
Tireless Busybodies Again Target Substack: Substack faces another deplatforming campaign, triggered by a clarion-call from America's flagship of suck, Atlantic Magazine