Substack decision to remove Nazi accounts leads to outcry over censorship

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Substack banned five accounts from its website that allegedly incited Nazi extremism and violated company policies. The move led to mixed responses from its users, including a cohort who thought Substack overstepped its policies on freedom of expression and content moderation.  

Key Players

Founded in 2017, Substack is a subscription platform that allows users to send digital newsletters to subscribers, as well as utilize publishing, payment, analytics, and design infrastructure. In 2022, Substack earned $19 million in revenue.

Alongside Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi, Hamish McKenzie is one of three co-founders of Substack. His primary interests include technology and social issues. He previously worked in communications at Tesla and Kik.

Casey Newton is a journalist and the founder and editor of Platformer, a technology newsletter that focuses on understanding social networks and their relationships with the world. He previously served as a senior editor at The Verge, a technology news website.

Further Details

On Jan. 8, 2024, Platformer reported that Substack had removed some publications and planned to terminate the accounts of several that “endorse Nazi ideology.” 

Four days prior, Newton had flagged six accounts that he believed were the “most blatant violators of the company’s policies,” which included extremist rhetoric and “overt Nazi iconography,” The Washington Post reported. Following Newton’s concerns, Substack removed five of the six accounts.

Despite the prompt response, Substack decided not to change the wording of its content policy and said it did not plan to remove proactively any neo-Nazi or far-right extremist content, Platformer claimed. 

McKenzie emphasized that the removed publications only account for about 100 active readers in total, with no paid subscriptions. Thus, Substack would take “appropriate action” in the presence of other content that violates its guidelines, rather than change its content policy altogether. 

Over the years, Substack has sparked controversy because of its lax policy on content moderation. Notably, the platform was criticized for permitting anti-vaccine voices to promote “unfounded” claims on its website during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, Substack’s co-founders released a statement differentiating the platform from other social media websites. “We prefer a contest of ideas. We believe dissent and debate is important. We celebrate nonconformity,” they wrote.

Because the site allows writers to set up their own newsletters and subscription rules, with limited content review, many of its most popular writers hold right-leaning or libertarian beliefs and “routinely criticize ‘woke politics’ and ‘cancel culture,’” The Post reported. 

Substack hopes to leave content moderation in the hands of its users. “We are 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 the platform,” Substack told Platformer.

In November 2023, Jonathan Katz of The Atlantic reported that “at least 16 of the newsletters that [he] reviewed [had] covert Nazi symbols, including the swastika and the sonnenrad, in their logos or in prominent graphics.” Several others contained elements of far-right extremism. For example, the Substack White-Papers carried the tagline “Your pro-White policy destination.”

The following month, 247 Substack writers sent an open letter to the platform, accusing the website of allowing users to profit from white nationalism through a monetization process in which Substack receives 10% of subscription profit. They called for a response from Substack’s official newsletter. 

“Is platforming Nazis part of your vision of success?” the open letter asked.

On Dec. 21, McKenzie released a statement, saying, “We don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views.” However, McKenzie upheld the platform’s stance on content moderation, asserting that censorship would only worsen the problem of extremism. Given that censorship has been “used by the powerful to silence the powerless,” McKenzie advocated for “supporting individual rights and civil liberties while subjecting ideas to open discourse” in order to reduce the power of “bad ideas.”

Outcome

Mixed responses over Substack’s decision

Substack’s response and decision to remove the five accounts resulted in mixed reactions. 

Journalist Walker Bragman determined that the company’s actions were “too little, too late to change his mind” about Substack’s attitude toward content moderation, adding that there was still “a ton of disinformation” on the platform. 

Author Paris Marx, another writer who quit Substack, claimed that its decision to remove the accounts was “a PR move to try to put this controversy behind them,” rather than a “real effort to address their content moderation problem.”

However, other prominent users supported Substack’s commitment to Free Speech. Writer Jessica Reed Kraus felt that Substack should not have taken action at all, adding that the platform’s lack of censorship during the pandemic led her to use the website in the first place.

“I don’t believe policing content online solves anything,” Kraus stated. “I say, let adults read and think like adults.”

Commentator Matthew Yglesias, who has over 121,000 subscribers on Substack, called the controversy overblown, given the lack of evidence of an “actual volume of Nazi content” that warrants major concern. He compared complaints against Substack to calls at certain universities to restrict pro-Palestinian activism as “hate speech.”

“I also think that people calling for stricter moderation regimes tend to be a little blind to the potential downsides,” Yglesias claimed.

Platformer leaves Substack

On Jan. 11, 2024, Newton released a statement titled “Why Platformer is leaving Substack,” noting the platform’s refusal to “explicitly ban praise for Nazi hate speech.” He further emphasized that those responsible for the hate speech were actively permitted and encouraged to sell subscriptions.

Newton added that regardless of the extent of extremism and hate on the platform, the main issue was that Substack had not made “clear that it will take proactive steps to remove hate speech and extremism.” 

“I believe Nazi ideology is made more appealing by the people who spread it than it is by the people who choose not to host it,” he emphasized, referring to the rise of antisemitism in schools, pop culture, and online.

As of Jan. 30, there were no further developments.