Substack Says It Will Not Ban Nazis or Extremist Speech | Hacker News Reader

Substack Says It Will Not Ban Nazis or Extremist Speech

nytimes.com

11 pointsslyrus5 comments

Substack has done an excellent job of showcasing how much writers need editors. I live my life in between the two awful worlds of programmers who have never had a humanities class and are therefore functionally illiterate, and writers who are so fearful of technology and are unable to move past the need for a "platform."

The publishers that most writers adore would never profit from white supremacy, yet they are fine with a middleman, no different than airbnb and Uber, that has no publishing standards because self-publishing on a blog or something similar is some antiquated symbol of failure in the modern literary mind.

"Nazi or extremist speech" is not a well-defined term in fact very dangerous term to be used as a censorship term. It is very similar to a typical dictator ship law term such as "looting or other disturbing activities", the key to combine a relatively well-defined term with a very extended not well defined term so it gives it enlarged power of arbitration.

Some important notes:

- they monetize neo-Nazis and are proudly doing so

- they ban a lot of legal speech, including advocating eating disorders and erotic content

- one of the founders recently hosted unrepentant eugenicist Richard Hanania on his podcast

- similar to the situation with Twitter, this is a private company that has a right to moderate their content as they see fit, and no one is asking for government intervention -- just a boycott

The evidence suggests that they're monetizing neo-Nazi content not because of a commitment to free speech or even because of greed, but because they agree with it. If they believed in free speech, they wouldn't ban content about eating disorders, and if they were greedy, they'd certainly have a lot of porn on the platform.

This just goes to show the problem with centralized platforms.

This kind of what-content-is-allowed drama doesn’t exist when everyone just has their own self-hosted blog.

We've already seen that this isn't remotely true. Unpopular enough small/independent content just leads the advocacy crowd to call for Cloudflare gatekeeping instead.

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