One of Substack’s most prominent writers is quitting the newsletter platform over its moderation decisions, citing that it is platforming and monetizing pro-Nazi content.
Tech newsletter Platformer was started on Substack by former The Verge editor Casey Newton in October 2020; his fellow Verge alum, Zoë Schiffer has served as managing editor since 2022. Substack had its merits back then, Newton writes. “It was fast and easy to set up. It paid to design Platformer’s logo. It offered me a year of healthcare subsidies, and ongoing legal support…[and] a personal connection to Substack’s co-founders, who believed that Platformer would succeed even before it had a name,” Newton wrote in a blog post announcing the newsletter’s move.
But its “laissez-faire approach to content moderation” rang alarm bells for Platformer, Newton writes, and intensified in recent months. An investigation published in The Atlantic in November exposed an expansive network of pro-Nazi content on the platform, along with how Substack profits from it. Hundreds of Substack writers pressured the platform for a response.
In a Dec. 21 post, Substack co-founder and CEO Hamish McKenzie wrote, “we don’t like Nazis either.” But the post also emphasized that Substack would not remove extremist, pro-Nazi content—and doubled down, saying it would only intervene if content posed credible threats of violence.
“The company’s edgelord branding ensures that the fringes will continue to arrive and set up shop, and its infrastructure creates the possibility that those publications will grow quickly,” Newton wrote. “That’s what matters.”
Quotable: Banning hate speech versus censorship
Substack’s McKenzie on Dec. 21: “We don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse. 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.”
Platformer’s Casey Newton on Jan. 12: “This was the moment where I started to think Platformer would need to leave Substack. I’m not aware of any major US consumer internet platform that does not explicitly ban praise for Nazi hate speech, much less one that welcomes them to set up shop and start selling subscriptions.”
Substack’s recommendation engines help white nationalists grow
Platformer, which is ranked fourth among Substack’s top 25 tech newsletters, was already debating leaving the newsletter provider in a Jan. 5 post. Substack had evolved, Newton wrote, from merely a newsletter host. In recent years, Substack has added features that seem aimed less at being a publishing platform and more at being a social network.
Some of those features allow writers to recommend other newsletters, serve readers algorithmically-ranked post recommendations, and enable Substack users to participate in a Twitter-esque feature called Notes. Users are now more likely to encounter posts from around the network, regardless of whether they follow their writers; they’re also given plenty of inputs to be connected to other newsletters via recommendation.
Unlike social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, that “made it difficult or even impossible for them to monetize their audiences,” on Substack, “the pieces are now all in place for an extremist Substack to grow an audience using the platform’s recommendation systems, and monetize that audience via subscriptions,” Newton wrote.
Those same systems helped Platformer grow; Newton says it has amassed an audience of 170,000 free subscribers, with 70,000 of them in 2023. “While I would love to credit that growth exclusively to our journalism and analysis, I believe we have seen firsthand how quickly and aggressively tools like these can grow a publication,” Newton wrote. “And if Substack can grow a publication like ours that quickly, it can grow other kinds of publications, too.”
But for Platformer, those growth benefits are secondary to its Nazi concerns.
Host of interest: Ghost
Platform will be migrated to a new website powered by the nonprofit, open-source publishing platform Ghost, Newton wrote in his post. Existing subscribers will be transferred over automatically.
Ghost’s terms of service ban content that “is violent or threatening or promotes violence or actions that are threatening to any other person.”
Ghost founder and CEO John O’Nolan committed to Platformer that Ghost’s hosted service “will remove pro-Nazi content, full stop,” Newton wrote. “If nothing else, that’s further than Substack will go, and makes Ghost a better intermediate home for Platformer than our current one.”
Moreover, Ghost doesn’t have, nor does it say it plans to build, a recommendation infrastructure like Substack’s. “[Even] if Nazis were able to set up shop here, they would be denied access to the growth infrastructure that Substack provides them. Among other benefits, that means that there is nowhere on Ghost where their content will appear next to Platformer,” Newton explained.
More broadly, rival platforms have emerged with “more robust content moderation policies, and with terms friendlier to business,” Newton added. By no longer having to share 10% of its revenue with Substack, Platformer will save tens of thousands of dollars.
Neo-nazis on Substack, by the digits
16: Newsletters with explicit Nazi imagery, including swastikas and “sonnenrad,” or the black sun symbol often used by modern white supremacists, much of which algorithms could easily detect, The Atlantic reported in November
$9,000: How much alt-right leader Richard Spencer, who helped organize the notorious “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville a few years ago, is making via his paid Substack per year at minimum, “and potentially many times that,” as per The Atlantic
10%: Substack’s cut of subscription revenue
247: Substack writers that penned an open letter, asking the company to explain its decision to publish and profit from neo-Nazis. The cohort also called Substack out for not being as hands off as it claims when it comes to content moderation. “We know you moderate some content, including spam sites and newsletters written by sex workers,” they wrote. “Why do you choose to promote and allow the monetization of sites that traffic in white nationalism?”
7: Substacks that Newton, Schiffer, and and their colleague Lindsey Choo discovered “conveyed explicit support for 1930s German Nazis and called for violence against Jews, among other groups.” Substack removed most of them after meeting with the Platformer team, but only after asking to keep conversations off the record and refusing to publicly commit to proactively removing pro-Nazi material in the future
