I haven’t been around much over the past 2 months, due to an increase in life commitments around health (mine and other loved ones’). This newsletter is different. Its mostly a collective letter to Substack leadership. Despite being late to the party, its important enough for me to publish - and I hope you’ll read it if you haven’t already fallen over it a dozen times. I’ve rounded it out with my further thoughts. I note, in passing, that ableism is a tool of nazism and racism so its not such a reach as it might at first appear.
Substackers Against Nazis
Dear Chris, Hamish & Jairaj:
We’re asking a very simple question that has somehow been made complicated: Why are you platforming and monetizing Nazis?
According to a piece written by Substack publisher Jonathan M. Katz and published by The Atlantic on November 28, this platform has a Nazi problem:
“Some Substack newsletters by Nazis and white nationalists have thousands or tens of thousands of subscribers, making the platform a new and valuable tool for creating mailing lists for the far right. And many accept paid subscriptions through Substack, seemingly flouting terms of service that ban attempts to ‘publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes’...Substack, which takes a 10 percent cut of subscription revenue, makes money when readers pay for Nazi newsletters.”
As Patrick Casey, a leader of a now-defunct neo-Nazi group who is banned on nearly every other social platform except Substack, wrote on here in 2021: “I’m able to live comfortably doing something I find enjoyable and fulfilling. The cause isn’t going anywhere.” Several Nazis and white supremacists including Richard Spencer not only have paid subscriptions turned on but have received Substack “Bestseller” badges, indicating that they are making at a minimum thousands of dollars a year.
From our perspective as Substack publishers, it is unfathomable that someone with a swastika avatar, who writes about “The Jewish question,” or who promotes Great Replacement Theory, could be given the tools to succeed on your platform. And yet you’ve been unable to adequately explain your position.
In the past you have defended your decision to platform bigotry by saying you “make decisions based on principles not PR” and “will stick to our hands-off approach to content moderation.” But there’s a difference between a hands-off approach and putting your thumb on the scale. We know you moderate some content, including spam sites and newsletters written by sex workers. Why do you choose to promote and allow the monetization of sites that traffic in white nationalism?
Your unwillingness to play by your own rules on this issue has already led to the announced departures of several prominent Substackers, including Rusty Foster and Helena Fitzgerald. They follow previous exoduses of writers, including Substack Pro recipient Grace Lavery and Jude Ellison S. Doyle, who left with similar concerns.
As journalist Casey Newton told his more than 166,000 Substack subscribers after Katz’s piece came out: “The correct number of newsletters using Nazi symbols that you host and profit from on your platform is zero.”
We, your publishers, want to hear from you on the official Substack newsletter. Is platforming Nazis part of your vision of success? Let us know—from there we can each decide if this is still where we want to be.
Signed,
Armchair Rebel (Michelle Spencer)
Further thoughts
The letter has, so far, been shared on a couple hundred newsletters. It received a very underwhelming non-response from Hamish in mid-December (tl:dr we don’t like nazis but we won’t be doing anything about them). The ‘let the substack moderate itself’ position is complicated by Substack’s strict no-porn rule. I would have though that could be sorted by an ‘adult sexual content’ tag and an option to opt out of all such content.
There are some good discussions around free speech, I appreciated
You can be Pro-Free Speech and Anti-Hate Speech at the Same Time.One of the writers of colour I follow, Sharon Hurley Hall, left the platform. The response from Substack seems to have been the last straw, given that she had received no support when attacked by trolls on at least a couple of occasions. Sharon’s Anti-Racism Newsletter is now on beehiiv.
Many other writers are looking to go, or have gone elsewhere, taking their subscribers with them, as The Guardian noted earlier this week.
Others are choosing to stay because they don’t want to cede a space they and their subscribers love to nazis. Some are choosing to stay because they don’t view any publishing platform as much better (about moderation). For now, I’m in that last camp.
I am concerned about the relatively small number of writers of colour on Substack. That tells me a lot. I am even more concerned that writers of colour don’t often show up on recommended lists. You can suppress free speech by suffocating some voices, and making it quietly clear they’re not especially welcome is one way to do that. Especially when the voices you’re excluding are already marginalised voices, who have learned the hard way to read a room to ensure their physical safety.
A pleasing exception is Sashi Perera Sashi Writes a comedian, writer and ‘recovering lawyer’ from Australia . She went seriously viral (from 1,000 to 100,000 followers on Insta) with one clip that has racked up 9 million views. Sashi came to Substack as she was sick of trolls and hoped that most of them wouldn’t cough up for a paid subscription to troll her. (So far, so good, it seems.) She’s funny, you should follow her.
And still… Substack needs to make money, so promoting a comedian who is clearly on fire right now is business as usual. The fact that the comedian is melanated and female but not from North America, not the descendent of slaves, and is a lawyer in her day job (ie middle class) also seems to be business as usual.
There are few overtly working class origin voices on Substack. I’ve been looking. Dana Miranda’s Healthy Rich is one, as is Anastasia Selby’s Navel Gazing. I grew up more working class than middle class, and in recent years I’ve begun to notice how often my voice was suffocated at university and in the working world. Even here on Substack, some of the writers I enjoy live very different lives, and seem happy to assume everyone reading their newsletter is solvent middle class. It’s ok to moan about needing money, as long as you need it to support a lifestyle. Needing it to pay rent feels like something that would make readers uncomfortable. I was not - and am not - ashamed of my background. I do notice I am more welcome when I mimic middle-class, or at least middle-class aspirations.
I have found a valuable community here on Armchair Rebel, and in the newsletters I read and subscribe to (mostly the free subscriptions for now). Its hard for me to separate wanting to stay to try to move the needle in a more inclusive direction, and seeing that as choosing my needs and my comfort over the immediate and future safety of writers of colour.
Thank you for reading, your time and attention are a gift.
Over to You
How do you navigate choices where no choice is unequivocably ‘good’? When both choices seem to have a lot of draw backs and a very uncertain benefit?
Do you have a way to check if your arguments in favour of the choice that best suits your needs are rationalisations? (They’re called rationalisations because they’re rational.)
How often do you revisit your choices? I like the idea of ‘do what you can, and when you can, do better’ rather than letting perfectionism (and a possible slight messiah complex) leave me in a state of paralysed inaction.
Thank you so much for your additional thoughts Michelle. Resonates much. I really appreciate the nuance and you giving words to so much of what I’ve felt. Substack feels very white middle class.
Hi Michelle 👋. I'm ✡, so my feelings on Nazis should be self evident. I imagine that I found out about you from someone's reads. From you, I added someone who likes cats, someone who had an article with cool old paintings and the woman you had a link to that indeed seems hilarious. I think you initially won me with an article about food or a refrigerator? Anyway, nice article 👍.