Back in November, the journalist Jonathan Katz wrote a piece for the Atlantic called “Substack Has a Nazi Problem.” In it, he documents several paid Substacks that employ explicit Nazi, Nazi-affiliated, and white nationalist imagery and language. On these sites, you can find Holocaust denial, advocacy for a white homeland within US borders, and other such ideas. I checked out a few of the newsletters Katz mentions. His characterization of them is accurate. It’s inarguable that there is a small but very real Nazi presence on the platform.
Some writers have already left the platform in protest over this issue. They argue that, since Substack takes a 10% cut of all revenue generated by paid subscriptions and Substack has chosen to take a hands-off approach to moderating content, including Nazi-identified content, any paid newsletter on the platform is, however indirectly, providing support to Nazis. They find this intolerable and have sought out other options, as is their right.
Others have written in support of Substack’s decision, though not because they have any affection for Nazis. Elle Griffin, for example, wrote an open letter lauding Substack’s very narrow content moderation policies and its empowerment of individual writers. We can all set our own content moderation policies. If any writer wants to ban Nazi content from their own newsletter’s comment section, it’s relatively easy to do so. Though I have my disagreements with Elle, I signed her open letter anyway, as I think her overall position is correct.
A group of Substackers wrote another open letter calling for Substack to ban Nazis. The key passage reads:
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 response, Hamish McKenzie, one of Substack’s founders, attempted just such an explanation, writing that he and the other founders feel that censorship cannot solve the “Nazi problem.” Rather, he says, “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.”
This is the state of the debate as it stands now. Substack has made its position clear: It’s not going to ban Nazis just because they’re Nazis.
I think this is the right decision. Nazism is reprehensible, but if Substack starts deciding which forms of speech are acceptable and which aren’t, it will become a censor, and the platform itself will inevitably take on certain partisan characteristics that will make it inhospitable to truly open debate. And there are limits. Substack tries to ban spam accounts and certain kinds of pornographic content. It prohibits incitements to violence. These seem to me like the minimum constraints necessary to keep any platform functioning.
If all one wanted to do was to vanquish Nazis, then Hamish's stated position would be wrong. But that's not the only consideration. My commitment to open discourse is not a utilitarian stand. It's a principled position, one that is essential to the foundations of a liberal order. A commitment to a liberal political order involves taking risks, including the chance that speech we abhor may go unrefuted.
Nazi speech may signal bad political values on the part of the speaker, but abandoning this platform because it refuses to ban Nazi speech would amount to endorsing the wrong-headed view that a certain kind of moral posturing is more important than the preservation of an open forum for the exchange of ideas. That's not a signal The Glenn Show wants to send. Rest assured, those Nazis are not going to be the last whose speech offends our moral sensibilities. And if we flee every time noxious ideas appear, eventually we’ll have nowhere left to go.
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