Substack turns on its "Nazis Welcome!" sign
Substack turns on its "Nazis Welcome!" sign
Back in April Substack founder/CEO Chris Best gave an interview to Nilay Patel in which he refused to answer some fairly basic questions about how the company planned to handle trust & safety i…
A tech company that values money over morality. This is new. I'm shocked. This is my shocked face → 😐
It's not just sub stack. Every social media company wants to avoid having to make editorial decisions. One, it's a never ending task that costs money and two, if you make editorial decisions on content you are a publisher. Being a publishers comes with lots of existing laws which they do not want to get involved in.
And anyway, is censorship the best way of fighting bigotry?
OK, let's see if I can explain this.
If you let Nazis stink up a site, normal people will stop going to that site because, get this, normal people don't want to talk to fucking Nazis. That means you've now got a Nazi site. (The same goes for any other kind of antisocial behaviour: tankies, sexual predators, etc.)
If you don't moderate your site, your site will turn to shit.
This is how a lot of sites also end up spiralling out of control. Notable in incel communities, you'll find that the most reasonable part of the group will leave as the core group gets too extreme. It's like a perpetual motion machine of negativity that constantly ejects it's most reasonable part to make space for a higher extreme.
Maybe. It's not really relevant. Censorship is the easiest way to shield your non-extremist users from being exposed to white nationalist propaganda, and that's valuable to businesses who ideally want as large possible of a mass of users.
For the same reason, if you want you bar to have as much business as possible, then making it a Nazi bar isn't that great of an idea.
And anyway, is censorship the best way of fighting bigotry?
The best way is a kick in the nuts, but keeping it off major commercial platforms, which isn't censorship, is another good method, yes.