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Platformer founder Casey Newton said Substack’s recent defence for hosting Nazi content, along with outcry from its readers, have pushed it to switch to a different publishing site.
The tech newsletter Platformer is moving away from Substack due to the recent controversy it has faced around giving Nazi supporters a platform.
Substack has faced criticism from various writers for giving Nazis a means to share and monetise their content – while earning a cut of the profits itself. The criticisms followed a report by The Atlantic last month that said Substack’s lax content moderation has created an opening for white nationalists to share their views.
Now, Platformer founder Casey Newton said his tech newsletter is leaving Substack as a result of this issue. In an article explaining the decision, he said the report by The Atlantic did not strike him as “cause to immediately leave Substack” because “all platforms host problematic and harmful material”.
But it was the response from Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie and later developments that made Newton feel that he may need to switch to a different site. McKenzie said in this response that “we don’t like Nazis either”, but argued that “some people do hold those and other extreme views”.
“We don’t think that censorship (including through demonetising publications) makes the problem go away – in fact, it makes it worse,” McKenzie said in the blogpost. “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.”
Newton said Platformer readers have also made it clear that they want the tech newsletter to leave Substack. The newsletter is shifting its business to the open-source publishing platform Ghost.
“Substack’s tools are designed to help publications grow quickly and make lots of money – money that is shared with Substack,” Newton said. “That design demands responsible thinking about who will be promoted and how. “
“The company’s defence boils down to the fact that nothing that bad has happened yet. But we have seen this movie before, from Alex Jones to anti-vaxxers to QAnon, and will not remain to watch it play out again.”
Altering the scope
Newton said Platformer looked through a list of Substack publications that allegedly hosted “advanced extremist ideologies” and found seven that conveyed “explicit support for 1930s German Nazis and called for violence against Jews, among other groups”.
Newton noted that this was not a “comprehensive review of hate speech” on the site, but said that Substack opted to share the scope of these findings with another “friendlier publication” on the platform, along with the information that these specific publications collectively had few subscribers and were not making money.
“The point of this leak, I believe, was to make the entire discussion about hate speech on Nazis on Substack appear to be laughably small: a mountain made out of a molehill by bedwetting liberals,” Newton said.
Newton said six out of these seven publications were removed by Substack. Newton also claimed that he had off-the-record conversations with Substack’s co-founders and that – from his understanding of these conversations – they would regard explicitly Nazi and pro-Holocaust material to be a violation of their existing policies in the future.
“But on Tuesday, when I wrote my story about the company’s decision to remove five publications, that language was missing from their statement,” Newton said. “Instead, the company framed the entire discussion as having been about the handful of publications I had sent them for review.”
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