Substack protects hate speech and censors anti-hate content
Today, Substack reminded us again why we need our own digital infrastructure.
We didn't pay much attention to this report by The Guardian, which revealed Substack is making money off Nazi propaganda. That’s until this afternoon when our weekend quiz on racism & eugenics in Silicon Valley disappeared from the feed.
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The Guardian revealed many examples of extremist content promoted by the Substack platform.
NatSocToday is understood to be run by a far-right activist based in the US and features a swastika, a symbol appropriated by the Nazi party in the 1920s to symbolise white supremacy, as its profile picture. The full name of the Nazi party was the National Socialist German Workers’ party.
One of its recent posts suggests the Jewish race was responsible for the second world war and describes Adolf Hitler as “one of the greatest men of all time”. Within two hours of subscribing to NatSocToday for the purposes of this investigation, the Substack algorithm directed the Guardian’s account to 21 other profiles featuring similar content.
Before the dudes show up to point out , “Duh. All platforms have Nazi content.” Let's be clear, what we did not know until today is that the platform ALSO throttles and censors anti-racist content. And now, we know this for a fact.
Here’s how it all started.
We began by posting a quiz every weekend to test how much people knew about Silicon Valley and do some myth-busting along the way.
In today’s quiz for Black History Month, we asked if people could identify which renowned AI expert & author has a history of racism based on some comments he shared in a mass email.
In our Substack dashboard, we could see this post was published but we couldn’t access it or promote it, and no one else could see it either.
That’s when we realized that our poll to raise awareness of Silicon Valley’s history of racism and eugenics has been censored by the “free speech platform,” Substack.
[You can take the quiz on the Women in AI Ethics™ LinkedIn page to test your knowledge, where it has not been censored…yet.]
We are disappointed but not shocked as Substack’s Nazi problem is well documented. The Atlantic covered it in 2023 and updated their report in 2024.
The newsletter-hosting site Substack advertises itself as the last, best hope for civility on the internet—and aspires to a bigger role in politics in 2024. But just beneath the surface, the platform has become a home and propagator of white supremacy and anti-Semitism. Substack has not only been hosting writers who post overtly Nazi rhetoric on the platform; it profits from many of them.
When asked on the Decoderpod about the overt racism on its platform, Substack CEO Chris Best danced around the issue and dismissed legitimate concerns raised by the interviewer, who happens to be a brown man, as “gotcha content moderation question." He alluded to “free speech” and “freedom of press," which we already know is absolute crock.
Our experience validates what many have been saying for a long time that we need to get off these tech bro platforms and build our own digital infrastructure.
Platformer, a prominent tech newsletter founded by the veteran reporter Casey Newton, left Substack in 2023 over the company’s failure to police extremist content.
In a post explaining the decision, Newton said his team had identified seven Substack publications “that conveyed explicit support for 1930s German Nazis and called for violence against Jews, among other groups”. He said after weeks of back-and-forth discussions with company leaders about their “laissez-faire approach to content moderation”, he decided to part ways with the platform.
Last year, Patreon was able to successfully lure some top writers on Substack writers to its platform, including Anne Helen Petersen who had this to say.
“I don’t want to be deeply invested in a platform whose business model is rooted in snagging readers through algorithmic manipulation. I don’t want to make money for founders who refuse to draw a line about platforming hate speech,”
This week, Substack announced its partnership with betting platform Polymarket, which critics say blurs the line between journalism and entertainment. Elizabeth Lopatto’s report on this latest development for The Verge is a must-read.
So by partnering with these betting markets, news organizations — from the legacy entities like WSJ or CNN to the burgeoning new media platforms like Substack — have undercut themselves two ways: first, by commodifying information and then by effectively endorsing competitors who can pay for that information; and second, by serving as advertising for prediction markets, making their audience vulnerable to getting ripped off by insiders.
It is unclear to me how helping gambling companies rip off your audience serves the public interest, which is, or at least once was, the point of newsgathering.
Agreed. It doesn’t make any sense except in the warped tech billionaire brotopia.
So where do we go from here?
We moved Women in AI Ethics™ and WAIE+ from our self-hosted newsletter on Mailchimp to Substack last year. Our audience growth on this platform has been steady but we’re always on the look out for ethical alternatives.
Here are some resources we found and we’ll keep adding more as we start our journey to transition off this and other toxic platforms.
How Limeleaf Divested from Big Tech and Took Ownership of Our Data
PRISM Break (Alternatives to dodge the American global espionage program)
Getting off US tech: a guide by Paris Marx
The Best Substack Alternatives (Wired.com)
Stay vigilant. Stay safe.