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Comment on Substack says it will not remove or demonetize Nazi content
mo_ztt@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Honestly? Unless I’m missing something, this sounds fine.
The internet I grew up on had Nazis, racists, Art Bell, UFO people, software pirates, and pornographers. The ACLU defended KKK rallies. Some of the people who were allowed a platform, that “everyone hated” and a lot of people wanted to censor, were people like Noam Chomsky who I liked hearing from.
I think there’s a difference between “moderation” meaning “we’re going to prevent Nazis from ruining our platform for people who don’t want to hear from them” – which, to me, sounds fine and in fact necessary in the current political climate – and “moderation” meaning “if you hold the wrong sort of views you’re not allowed to express them on my platform.” The Nazi bar analogy, and defederating with toxic Lemmy instances, refers to the first situation. If I understand Substack’s platform properly, it’s the second: Only the people who want to follow the Nazis can see the Nazis. No? Am I wrong in that?
I’m fully in agreement with McKenzie that not allowing “wrong” views to be expressed and legitimately debated makes it harder to combat them, not easier. They’re not gonna just evaporate because “everyone agrees they’re bad” except the people who don’t.
I realize this is probably a pretty unpopular view.
gmtom@lemmy.world 6 months ago
mo_ztt@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Where out of my message did you get that I was talking like it was harmless opinions? I get it that my tone was casual and I can apologize about that. Let me take it a little more seriously, then:
Let me guess, you’re not the kind of person that the Nazis are extremely keen on putting in a gas chamber?
Because you’re talking like this is just harmless, but unpopular opinions people have. Not a group of people who by definition think they are the master race and people who are “impure” need to be genocides.
I have a decent amount of Jewish ancestry and a Jewish name. I’m not practicing or anything. My parents had a friend who had the numbers tattooed on her arm.
Part of the reason I’m so casual about literal modern Nazis is that the modern threat of extremism isn’t specific to Jewish people. Hispanic people are probably more at risk; under Trump, ICE detention centers became temporarily something that any informed person would describe as for-real concentration camps. I think if it does start to happen in a big way in the US, it will probably start with trans and Hispanic people and continue from there.
But every single one of us, Jewish or LGBT or Hispanic or just Democrat-supporting, is at risk under a second Trump presidency or whatever the next iteration after Trump is. That’s not some abstract “I know your struggle” type of statement; I literally believe that Nazi-type violence and mass incarceration of “the enemy” are on the table according to a much wider swathe of the US populace than official-Nazi supporters.
And honestly I can’t fucking stand spineless cunts like you that think we can’t draw a reasonable line between Nazis calling for the end of entire races and for one of the worst atrocities in thr history of mankind to happen again, and Naom Chomsky. Putting “wrong” in quotation marks as if thinking genocidal racists being wrong is just a matter of opinion. And you have such little regard for the people that suffer at the hand of these scumbags that you think you can play devil’s advocate as a fun little excessive for yourself.
Okay, let me ask you, then. I have Facebook friends who make posts about getting themselves amped up for civil war if “the Democrats” keep it up. I would describe that as an atrocity. Dead is dead. A Jew in a concentration camp is just as dead as a Democrat who got shot by his neighbor because they got radicalized and decided today was the day (which has already happened, it’s just on a tiny scale at this stage).
Most of the way I talk about this issue is colored by that. I do take the threat of extremism seriously, because it’s already alive and well here, and growing. I think that figuring out what to do about the form in which it’s most likely to become a horrifying reality is fairly important. If Jews wind up going into modern-day concentration camps, they won’t be the first. They’ll be an afterthought, long after Trump’s political enemies and big segments of Hispanic (and maybe arab) people have gone in. If you’re serious about the threat to Jewish people and want me to take it seriously (which is fair), can I ask you to be serious about the threat to all the rest of us?
What is your solution to the people who want to write “shoot the Democrats because they stole the election and took away your country”? People who say that every day and platforms that give them voice? My feeling on it is the same as what I said to you about Nazis. But what, according to you, should we do that will work? I am more concerned about that, as a present-day urgent issue, than about “put the Jews into gas chambers” propaganda, although that’s clearly also horrifying.
gmtom@lemmy.world 6 months ago
What is your solution to the people who want to write “shoot the Democrats because they stole the election and took away your country”? People who say that every day and platforms that give them voice?
This might blow your mind a little bit: depilatform them. Hatespeech is hatescppech, a call to violence is a call to violence. Neither is protected by your first amendment, and both should be completely and utterly illegal.
This isn’t some difficult mystery to figure out. There’s no catch 22 or irreconcilable conflict of rights going on here. Its pretty cut and dry. Anyone whether they’re a traditional nazi, neo nazi, maga nazi does not have the right to call for peoples deaths or for violence against them.
Germany has had restriction on Nazis for a long time now. And hasn’t had issues with censoring non-nazi speech. So why can’t your country?
And also, if you allow for Nazi speech, how far do you take it? do you let them draw up plans and organise gangs to hunt down undesirables? Only intervening when the physical violence actually starts?
If you do not work to prevent atrocities, and turn a blind eye to those trying to commit them then you are in fact tacitly complicit in those atrocities.
mo_ztt@lemmy.world 6 months ago
This might blow your mind a little bit: depilatform them. Hatespeech is hatescppech, a call to violence is a call to violence. Neither is protected by your first amendment, and both should be completely and utterly illegal.
A lot of the thinking on things like free speech by the founding fathers was that it wasn’t like a “grant” of something the government is letting you do. It’s an acknowledgement of some simple physical realities of what thinking beings are going to do whether you “let them” or not. Nazis are going to talk to other Nazis. If you come into their Nazi place saying “whoa whoa whoa you can’t say that!”, they’re not going to just suddenly go, oh, my bad, you’re right, we won’t say that anymore. You might hate that the KKK is “allowed to exist” when their whole thing is violence, torture, basically organized evil. But, the government isn’t “allowing them to exist” in the same way it might let someone have a driver’s license. It’s more just that people good or bad are going to do certain things, and the government is acknowledging the reality.
I would actually put some other things in this list, sex work and drugs among them. For pretty much exactly the same reasons. I think as a matter of the fundamentals of law, they should be sort of in a “can’t be illegal” list, because it’s so weird and invasive to people’s liberty to even try.
Germany has had restriction on Nazis for a long time now. And hasn’t had issues with censoring non-nazi speech. So why can’t your country?
The US had robust protections on speech by the KKK and the American Nazi party, before during and after World War 2. In Germany, before and after the war, it’s legal for the government to allow and forbid particular political parties, as they currently do with the Nazis. Fair enough. Which country was it that actually had a holocaust again? Why didn’t the Nazis do it in the US, where they had such robust protections on their ability to speak and organize?
And also, if you allow for Nazi speech, how far do you take it? do you let them draw up plans and organise gangs to hunt down undesirables? Only intervening when the physical violence actually starts?
If you do not work to prevent atrocities, and turn a blind eye to those trying to commit them then you are in fact tacitly complicit in those atrocities.
So you can punish speech advocating for violence. It’s a tricky thing, because people will just speak in code, which is now happening all over the place. (I see that on Facebook – people will say, I can’t really say what I want to have happen, but we all know what the answer is. Things like that.) But yes, if someone says we have to kill the Jews, I think that should be illegal, whether or not they’re a Nazi. Talking to an associate to plan a robbery is illegal, publishing a newsletter planning a new holocaust is illegal. Saying the holocaust is a lie, I think should be legal. Saying Hitler was right, I think should be legal. That’s where I would draw the line.
It sounds – tell me if I’m wrong – like you think that I just don’t care about hate speech, or I don’t see why it might be a problem, or it’s not worth worrying about. Absolutely it’s a problem. On all this urgency you’re expressing, I 100% agree with you. I am saying that banning it makes that problem worse. Basically, my opposition to banning hate speech is because I don’t want it to “win.” The original internet (like Usenet era), the one I talked about way up there in my original comment, didn’t have anywhere near the level of embittered extremism that we see now. I think that’s because everyone was on the same network. Someone could go on and say “Hitler was right” and people pile on to tell that person why they were wrong. But you could say whatever you wanted. It’s like people who go to college and get less racist because they’re thrown into this big multicultural situation. There will still be racist people, yes. But things will be much worse, and people will be a lot less honest with you about their racist views, if the instant some person says something racist the college administation tells them they’re not welcome on campus anymore and they have to find a new society to be a part of that isn’t so multicultural. They get isolated and fester and find like-minded people to fester with. Which is what’s happening now on the internet.
I am sorry for talking so long; this is just important to me. The one last thing I’ll say – one main reason I’m so concerned about this is that I have a feeling that it won’t stop at Nazis; that as soon as Nazis are deplatformed they’ll start coming for the Joe Rogans and the Dave Chappelles on Substack, someone who is far from calling from a holocaust, but just has said something that someone decided isn’t allowed. Literal Nazis tend to call for genuine crimes, and tend to not attract as many followers as the kill-the-Democrats-oho-I-didn’t-mean-it-literally-wink crowd, so they’re easier to deal with. My main concerns are, please don’t try to censor the non-Nazis, and please what the fuck do we do about the new brand of extremists. I can’t literally agree with you that we should deplatform all my Facebook friends who call for violence in coded ways. I won’t claim to know what’s the right thing to do about this new type of propaganda but that doesn’t seem like the answer.
fubo@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Substack is not just allowing Nazis to use their product.
Substack is not just paying the hosting costs for Nazi essays.
They are paying the authors of those Nazi essays.
mo_ztt@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I don’t really understand Substack or fully grasp the issues involved; I’m just gonna say how I see it. I looked over their monetization page, and it kind of looks like the way it works is that the Nazi’s subscribers (other Nazis, presumably) can sign up for a subscription, and Substack I assume takes a cut, and the rest goes to the Nazi. So it kind of sounds like the Nazis are paying each other, with a cut of that going to Substack. Do I have that right? It sounds like the Nazis (in the aggregate) are paying Substack. Nobody at Substack is raising money and using it to subsidize any Nazis. The Nazis are subsidizing hosting for random other publishers who don’t have subscriptions. I think.
Irregardless of all that, I just have this general dislike of “demonitization” and the modern ethos of publishing on the internet. The demonitization on Youtube is totally weird. You can’t say “suicide” or refer to sexual abuse or have gunshot sounds or say “fuck” in the first thirty seconds, except sometimes you can, and some content which is clearly harmful is allowed, and other stuff gets randomly taken away. Everyone lives under the constant threat of saying the wrong thing and suddenly getting, essentially, fired. One extremely popular Youtuber I liked left because he couldn’t say what he wanted. John Stewart got “demonetized” from Apple+ just recently because he said something about China. The whole thing is stupid. Just let people say stuff. If it’s illegal, take it down and prosecute them. If it’s not, then let them say it. Yes I know the letter of the first amendment only applies to the government. I’m just saying I like the spirit, too. This culture’s developed of policing what people can and can’t say to a degree I find really off putting.
I get how we got here. You don’t want people saying not to take the COVID vaccine or that Biden drinks puppy blood every morning or anything, but the landscape we’ve wound up at is stupid. Just let people be Nazis if they’re Nazis. One of the really earthshattering moments for me on the early internet was reading posts from people who were “the enemy” in a shooting war that at the time I thought my country was “the good guys” of. It really blew my mind once I realized that Hamas is allowed to be on the internet, and North Korea, and Israel and The Daily Stormer and Hugo Chavez and Noam Chomsky. They’re all allowed to have their web site. The modern internet is becoming more and more siloed, so that “I’m allowed to run a web server if I want” is less and less a determiner of whether that culture can continue. For better or worse, we’re more than a little dependent now on whether big corporations who run the infrastructure want to let that chaotic “the bad guys are allowed to be here too” nature continue. They don’t seem like they want to, and I don’t like that.
Again, maybe this is an unpopular view, but that’s how I see it.
Doomsider@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Simply put propaganda works. If you allow people to spread hate then it grows. I don’t think you have ever been a person on the receiving side of hate where a group of people want you to cease to exist, to take your rights away, to torture you.
In our modern world if you spread intolerance you are shunned and deplatformed. That is a big improvement compared to the past. It is not perfect either.
You mentioned people get silenced unfairly or cut short because of pushing boundaries. This weighs heavy on your thought process imagining bogey men taking away people’s freedoms.
It is ultimately a naive and impractical viewpoint though borne out of privilege and lack of experience. This whole freedom of speech movement is a red hearing for hate speech and you bought into trying to be reasonable. There is no reasoning with them and you are simply wrong.
mo_ztt@lemmy.world 6 months ago
"Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate.” -Thomas Jefferson
Professionally produced and packaged propaganda to sway public opinion is absolutely a critical modern problem. I won’t say I have the solution. I can tell you from experience interacting with people who have been victimized by propaganda that they will happily follow the propaganda-sources off the “responsible” content networks who are censoring them and onto some other network that’s still willing to host them.
Put it another way: Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube all have policies designed to combat the spread of election denial and COVID denialism, by limiting people’s ability to post it on their networks. How’s that worked?
If you’re intending this as some sort of trump card, where you’re allowed to have an opinion on the matter and I’m not (when you have no idea what I have or haven’t been on the receiving end of), then don’t respond to this message and we can go our separate ways. If you’re interested in talking with me about it, then I’m happy to do that, and take what you say on your own merits and not come up with external reasons to dismiss it.
Oh, good. So intolerance’s spread on the internet is getting progressively smaller over time, is it? Thank God, it seemed for a while like that was a problem.
Sometimes, yes. There are a bunch of conservative people in the US who use “free speech” in a very particular way as a red herring for something much different and much darker. Why do you assume that I’ve been swayed by them? I spent some time yesterday and today arguing with one of them, I actually got annoyed that he didn’t seem to want to engage with me when I was eager to tell him about how he was wrong.
I notice, also, that you haven’t spent too much time responding to what I actually said; you told me a bunch of things about me, and reasons why my views can be discounted. Like I say, if that’s the way then we don’t need to talk.
Welp. Glad we cleared that up.
fubo@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Let’s take the Web out of the equation.
Let’s imagine this is all being done using the old-school printing press.
Let’s say Substack is a magazine publisher.
If you publish a Nazi magazine, that Nazis pay you to subscribe to …
… and you pay the Nazi authors of the Nazi articles in your Nazi magazine …
… then you’re a material supporter of Nazism.
mo_ztt@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Happy to.
With you so far.
Sounds good. The situation’s a little different because the publisher exercises editorial control over what they’re publishing, can get sued if it crosses certain lines, and so on, whereas literally any random person can publish stuff on Substack with some legal and technical differences. But it’s a pretty close analogy.
With you.
This is where it breaks down for me. This would be something like Substack Pro, where Substack really is subsidizing and organizing the make the Nazi content happen, instead of just hosting it like a Lemmy instance hosts a community. If they were giving Substack Pro to Nazis, then yes, I’d have a problem with that. That would fit very well with what you’re describing.
I would describe this part of the analogy as applying a little more sensibly to something like, Substack is the print shop that typesets the material for the Nazi magazine on behalf of the Nazi that wants to publish it. The Nazi is organizing their subscribers. The Nazi is putting out the content. The print shop is taking a cut, and willing to do business with Nazis. Are they free to say no? Absolutely. Actually in that analogy I’d probably refuse to typeset the magazine as well, for what it’s worth. Are they also free, though, to say, no, this is a free speech issue and we believe the KKK is allowed to have rallies and the Nazis are allowed to publish magazines? Sure. That to me would be a sensible thing to say. I don’t like Nazis any more than you do. But I do think they should be allowed to publish magazines, yes, and I think that applies to making it actually possible for them to publish, and not just the government telling them they have permission, but the system they’re placed within making it impossible for it to actually happen.
In financial flow terms, the Nazi subscribers are supporting Substack through the 10% cut that Substack takes. No money is flowing out of the Substack account to the Nazis without having first flowed in from other Nazis, and Substack keeps some of it. Right? That’s why I think the print shop analogy is a little more fitting in this case.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Oh, well that makes it okay then. It’s Substack earning money from Nazis.