Squaring the Circle.
Substackers against Nazis, reloaded.
In December, i was one of the first signers of the Substackers Against Nazis-letter. Now, Substack is going to remove five Nazi newsletters of six reported by The Platformer after investigating "dozens". They are also "actively working on more reporting tools that can be used to flag content that potentially violates our guidelines, and we will continue working on tools for user moderation so Substack users can set and refine the terms of their own experience".
On one hand, there's 1.7 million newsletters on Substack, and even if you take all those "dozens" as Nazi-newsletters, this is not that big of a problem. It's good to push Substack towards a more strict moderation of those dozens, and "close to zero" would be my prefered number of Nazi-Substackers, but i also live in a country were rightwing extremists hold secret conferences with guests from establishment parties to organize the abandonment of basic civil rights of german citizens with imigration backgrounds and the rightwing extremist party heavily involved in that secret conference may swing the vote in eastern germany and gain a majority.
That's truly a big Nazi problem.
On the other hand, the only way to fight Nazism is to ruthlessly stomp them out as soon as they raise their head, without mercy or second thoughts. There is no other way, and calling that a game of "Whack a Mole" is downplaying what's at stake. This is why i signed the Substackers against Nazis-letter in the first place, and this is why i think that "free speech absolutism" (which does not exist anyways in any given society) is wrong, philosophically, historically and scientifically.
All ideologies are memeplexes, and the only way to fight the spread of memes is to increase friction, especially when they target basic human emotions like, in the case of nazism, fear. Nazism combines memes about purity with superiority of the tribe and conspirational thinking, resulting in völkisch racism and antisemitism which in turn lead to the targeting of minority groups and the erradication of their basic human rights. We've seen what happens when you allow this memeplex to spread without friction in Nazi-germany — the Shoa —, and we're seeing what happens when you allow this memeplex to spread without fiction on the web: a series of deadly attacks of stochastic rightwing terrorism, caused by frictionless virality of a deadly memeplex on unmoderated platforms.
Substack and the people who wrote and signed the free speech absolutist Substack shouldn’t decide what we read (which btw is not the grassroots effort you may think it is, it was heavily promoted by the Substack founders) are simply dead wrong when they say that deplatforming doesn't work. A recent paper found that, yes, "deplatforming norm-violating influencers on social media reduces overall online attention toward them". Who would've thought.
The question for Substack then is, if Nazism, or tolerance towards Nazism, is a norm-violation, and if their "norm of non-nazism" has a higher priority than their "norm of free speech". For me, Antifascism has a higher priority than free speech. For them, i guess not.
Overall i think it's a good thing that Substack at least aknowledges there's Nazis on the platform that violate their TOS and consequently kick them off the platform, when they become aware of those violations. In that sense, they are not much different from any other platform. I also think it's a good thing they'll introduce more reporting tools, increasing friction to at least somewhat diminish the spread of the fascist memeplex. I'm not sure if it's good enough, for many others it is not, but i'll take it.
And then there's also the somewhat shoddy reporting by The Platformer, documented in this piece by Jesse Singal who i know many on the left don't like. I don't care, and he has a point.
Also, see above, i don't think that "dozens of 1.7 million" is enough to game-theoretically turn Substack into the much cited "Nazi-Bar". It takes more than that. ("Nazi Bar" also is a stupid metaphor for platforms to begin with, because it downplays one of the key factors that define a platform: scale). Platforms with millions of users are not like bars (small venues for a few hundred people), they are stadiums or train stations, and in my estimation, you'll find "dozens of Nazis" at any large Taylor Swift concert too, the difference being that at a train station or Taylor Swift concert, they don't organize and spread their ideology. The difference between Substack and a stadium hosting a Taylor Swift concert is: Strong moderation. Any Nazis spreading their shit there would be kicked out by security, as it should be.
Substack now is trying to square the circle, maintain a (dumb) absolutist free speech stance while introducing new moderation tools, so that those "dozens of Nazis" don't cross the line, feel the friction when they try to spread their fascist memeplex and are put into place. I wish them good luck in their marketing effort.
Finally, I'm staying here on the stack (for now) for very pragmatic reasons:
I'm not a political person by and large. I have some principles and i have opinions, which, put together, place me on the left side of the spectrum, but i'm not an ideologue and political fights are not interesting to me.
I like the platform design.
I'm poor and i simply can't afford the cost of Beehiiv or Ghost, while publishing on Substack is free.
Simple as that. If i ever make some money, i'd change my mind.