Comment on Substack says it will not remove or demonetize Nazi content
mo_ztt@lemmy.world 10 months agoAgreed. I actually had come back to this topic specifically to make this exact point, which for all the time I’d spent on this at this point I feel like I hadn’t said.
People are adults, generally speaking. It’s weird to say that you can’t have a newsletter that has a literal swastika on it, because people will be able to read it but unable to realize that what it’s saying is dangerous violence. Apparently we have to have someone “in charge” of making sure only the good stuff is allowed to be published, and keeping away the bad stuff, so people won’t be influenced by bad stuff. This is a weird viewpoint. It’s one the founding fathers were not at all in agreement with.
Personally, I do think that there’s a place for organized opposition to slick internet propaganda which pulls people down the right-wing rabbit hole, because that’s a huge problem right now. I don’t actually know what that opposition looks like, and I can definitely see a place for banning certain behaviors (bot accounts, funded troll operations, disguising the source of a message) that people might class as “free speech,” or adding counterbalancing “free speech” in kind to misleading messages (Twitter’s “community notes” are actually a pretty good way of combating it for example). But simply knee-jerking that we have to find the people who are wrong, and ban them, because if we let people say wrong stuff then other people will read it and become wrong, is a very childish way to look at people who consume media on the internet.
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 10 months ago
This article is not about government censorship. This is about a private entity actively deciding to allow nazi content on their platform. Hang wringing about founding fathers belongs in some other thread where the topic is the government prohibiting content from being published.
mo_ztt@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I’m aware of how the first amendment applies, yes. I agree with the spirit of it in addition to the letter, though. You’re free to delete the one sentence where I talked about founding fathers, and respond to the whole rest of my message which doesn’t reference them or government censorship in any way.
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 10 months ago
Fine.
How is “can’t” happening, here? It’s not the government. Are you arguing against private entities having editorial freedom? Should private entities not be in charge of their own publications and platforms? And if they do choose to publish nazi stuff, shouldn’t the rest of us be free to say “Fuck off, nazi scum” ?
As I said to someone else, there is presumably a line that’s too much to cross. Is it “live stream of grinding up live babies and puppies and snorting them”? If there is no line, I don’t even know where to begin. That’s a whole other conversation. If there is a line, I think nazi content should be on the far side of it. Don’t you? And if the line is something like “whatever’s technically legal”, well that’s just punting responsibility to a slower, less responsive, ruleset run by the government.
Platforms taking some responsibility for what they allow would go a long way without requiring a heavy handed government solution. Substack could just say “nah, we’re not letting nazis post stuff.”
But if a platform is making a lot of money with nazi content, they’re probably going to be reluctant to deal with it. So if you still don’t want heavy government involvement (which can be a reasonable position, probably), you fall back to individuals saying “Fuck you. I’m not going to use your service while you serve nazis.”
But then you have several related problems. Something that’s a hugely dominant player in a market is hard to avoid. YouTube doesn’t have a lot of major competitors, for example, and is pretty ubiquitous. AWS is basically impossible to avoid. And on top of that, many people are apathetic or too busy trying to survive to spend a lot of time curating things.
What even is the spirit of it?
mo_ztt@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Yes, absolutely. Lemmy.world should be able to ban Nazis if they want to, as should Substack. Personally, I think it would be better in some cases if people didn’t. Although, there’s so much overlap between Nazis and general-toxic-behavior users that I wouldn’t really fault them for banning Nazis outright even if they theoretically supported the Nazis’ right to free speech.
Notably though, I think Substack should also be free to not ban Nazis, and no one should give them shit for it. In particular, they definitely shouldn’t be talking about trying to get their Stripe account cancelled, or pressuring their advertisers, as I’ve seen other posters here advocate for (although I think the thing about advertisers is just a result of pure confusion on the poster’s part about how Substack even makes income).
In this particular case, I think allowing the Nazis to speak is the “right answer,” so I definitely don’t advocate for interfering in anything Substack wants to do with their private servers. But no, I also don’t think anyone who doesn’t want to host Nazis should have to, and it’s a pretty good and reasonable question.
Let me say it this way: If what you’re doing or saying would be illegal, even if you weren’t a Nazi, it should be illegal. It shouldn’t suddenly become illegal to say if you’re wearing a Nazi uniform. Threatening violence? Illegal. Threatening violence as part of your Nazi political platform? Illegal. Wearing a Nazi uniform, saying that white people are superior and the holocaust didn’t happen? Legal as long as you’re not doing some other illegal thing, even though historically that’s adjacent to clearly-illegal behavior.
I realize there can be a good faith difference of opinion on that, but you asked me what I thought; that’s what I think. If it’s illegal to wear a Nazi uniform, or platforms kick you off for wearing one, then it can be illegal to wear a BLM shirt, and platforms can kick you off for saying #blacklivesmatter. Neither is acceptable. To me.
Probably the closest I can come to agreeing with you is on something like Patriot Front. Technically, is it legal to gather up and march around cities in threatening fashion, with the implication that you’ll attack anyone who tries to stop you? Sure. Is it dangerous? Fuck yes. Should it be legal? Um… maybe. I don’t know. Am I happy that people attacked them and chased them out of Philadelphia, even though attacking them was interfering with their free speech? Yes. I put that in a much more dangerous category than someone hosting a web site that says the holocaust didn’t happen.
Would it go a long way, though?
Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter have been trying to take responsibility for antivax stuff and election denialism for years now, and banned it in some cases and tried to limit its reach with simple blacklisting. Has that approach worked?
Nazi stuff is unpopular because it’s abhorrent and people can see that when they read it. I genuinely don’t think that allowing Nazi speech on Substack is a step towards wider acceptance of Naziism. I don’t think there are all these people who might have been Nazis but they’re prevented by not being able to read it on Substack. I do think allowing Nazi stuff on Substack would be a step towards exposing the wider community to the actual reality of Naziism, and exposing the Nazis to a community which can openly disagree with them instead of quarantining them in a place where they can only talk to each other.
I do think responsibility by the platforms is an important thing. I talked about that in terms of combatting organized disinformation, which is usually a lot more sophisticated and a lot more subtle than Nazi newsletters. I just don’t think banning the content is a good answer. Also, I suspect that the same people who want the Nazis off Substack also want lots of other non-Nazi content to be “forbidden” in the same way that, e.g. Dave Chappelle or Joe Rogan should be “forbidden” from their chosen platforms. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but that’s part of why I make a big deal about the Nazi content.