The Assault on Substack Takes Predictable Shape

"Hang Tough, Substack. We Need You."

By Bill Rice, Brownstone Institute

For a while now I’ve been worried Substack would become a major target of the Censorship Industrial Complex for the hideous and dangerous crime of allowing free speech.

This story from The UK newspaper the Guardian, which was picked up by Citizen Free Press, might be significant or at least bears watching.

Here are the key excerpts with a few of my editorial comments added:

“The email newsletter service Substack is facing a user revolt after its chief executive defended hosting and handling payments for “Nazis” on its platform, citing anti-censorship reasons.”

Comment: I seriously doubt this is a serious “user revolt,” but that’s the way it will (and already has been) portrayed.

“…In a note on the site published in December, the chief writing officer, Hamish McKenzie, said the firm “doesn’t like Nazis,” and wished “no one held these views.”

“But he said the company did not think that censorship – by demonetising sites that publish extreme views – was a solution to the problem, and instead made it worse.”

Comment: Hip-Hip-Hoo-ray! Thank you, Hamish.

“… Some of the largest newsletters on the service have threatened to take their business elsewhere if Substack does not reverse its stance.”

Comment: This is the way these censorship movements always start – accuse someone (or an entire writers’ platform) of being “Nazis,” “extremists,” “racists,” or “science deniers”…which is usually enough to get the deplatforming started.

Now we should all be on the lookout for more stories along these lines. If the Democrats were still in charge of the House of Representatives, we’d have hearings on the “Nazi Substack” with the usual statements of outrage that this platform hasn’t been banned yet.

“…On Tuesday Casey Newton, who writes Platformer – a popular tech newsletter on the platform with thousands of subscribers paying at least $10 a month – became the most prominent yet.

“Rolling out a welcome mat for Nazis is, to put it mildly, inconsistent with our values here at Platformer,” he said today. “We have shared this in private discussions with Substack and are scheduled to meet with the company later this week to advocate for change.”

Comment: Always follow the money. Questions: Who’s funding or pushing Platformer to deplatform free speech…and why?

“….Other newsletters have already made the jump. Talia Lavin, a journalist with thousands of paid subscribers on her newsletter The Sword and the Sandwich, moved to a competing service, Buttondown, on Tuesday.

“We’ve left Substack behind, after its founders stated, in no uncertain terms, that they’re not just OK with, but in principle supportive of, having loads of out-and-out Nazis on their platform,” she wrote.

Comments: I for one did not know that Substack had “loads and loads of out-and-out Nazis on their platform.”

But even if it does (which it doesn’t), I say (at least from what I know now), let them post away. The only Nazi-like techniques I see influencing any important narratives come from the government and its many fascist partners.

Also, why didn’t this article give us some excerpts from some of these “Nazi” Substack authors? For example, are these posters calling for the extermination of the Jews?

If these newsletter sites are advocating murder or violence, kick them off, but I don’t know that they are.

Also, how many subscribers do these sites have? Out of the tens of thousands of Substack authors and 30+ million Substack subscribers, how many are Nazis?

As usual, we get shocking charges with no examples given of alleged shocking speech.

We also learn from offended journalist Talia Lavin that her Substack site had grown to “thousands of paid subscribers.”

Apparently, Substack was very popular and lucrative for anti-Nazis like Ms. Lavin.

(I wish I had “thousands of paid subscribers.” In fact, I’ve recently begun to wonder if my paid and total subscriber numbers are being sabotaged by some kind of nefarious and secret Censorship Industrial Complex operation.)

Ah, the Money Quote…

“…Substack declined to comment on Newton’s remarks. The site has been consistent in its opposition to content moderation, telling the Guardian in 2022 that moves to silence vaccine sceptics would not work.”

Comments: Here, I suspect we get to the real issue and the real goal. These groups allegedly offended by “Nazi hate speech” are no doubt really incensed because Substack hasn’t “silenced vaccine skeptics”…yet.

Good for Substack’s executives defending the vaccine skeptics, who I’d argue made Substack a popular and important speech platform all by themselves.

What Substack’s enemies really want is the type of life-saving “content moderation” we get from more-virtuous speech platforms like Facebook, which employs more than 15,000 “content moderators,” as well as the ingenious algorithms and AI that nix unauthorized speech without human effort.

The vast majority of Substack authors don’t receive any advertising support. If we did, we’d already be hearing calls for advertiser boycotts.

Hang Tough, Substack. We Need You.

Anyway, I thought it was a matter of time before a concerted and Machiavellian effort commenced to scuttle Substack as we’ve come to know it and rely on it.

Since the executives at Substack are now being inundated with calls to censor its users, I hope many Substack authors and subscribers reach out to this vital company’s leaders and implore them to “not go wobbly” in this existential fight to preserve a few places where free speech still exists.

By now, nobody should be naive. The real goal is to shut Substack (as we’ve known it) down – which must mean the truth bombs its correspondents are launching every day are starting to hit too close to key targets.

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