The ethics of where we publish
This article originally appeared on Substack, before I left Substack for the reasons explained in this very blog post.
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When to walk away
Hi there,
It’s come to my attention that this website that I use to send my newsletter — called Substack — is allowing literal Nazis to earn an income by publishing their hate speech here, despite the company’s policy banning hate speech. When I first heard about this, I was disgusted, but I’ll admit that I was unsure what I wanted to do about it. After all, sick though it may be, Nazis are everywhere online, and if we only published on or communicated through platforms run by ethical people and companies, we wouldn’t publish or communicate. Isn’t it better to flood said platforms with constructive voices than cede them to destructive ones?
But when a group of Substack account holders wrote a public letter holding the company to account, Substack’s response was, in a word, unacceptable. Here’s what co-founder Hamish MacKenzie said:
I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views. But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.
“Some people do hold those and other extreme views” is an inadequate characterization of the desire to erase entire populations of people from the face of the earth.
The larger issue of censoring hate speech online
I understand that, per the American Library Association, there is no legal definition of hate speech under U.S. law, and that it can only be criminalized when shown to directly incite criminal activity or call for violence. Well, as one of the Substack publishers who wrote the open letter, Marisa Kabas, put it, “If being a literal Nazi who supports Nazi policies and encouragingly posts Nazi imagery isn’t an incitement to violence, then what is?” It’s not like there’s some sort of “gentle Naziism.'“
What’s more, as University of Oregon journalism professor Olivia Phillips observes in an article about Substack in The Atlantic, the problem is not that stumbling onto Nazi newsletters will magically turn anyone who reads them into a National Socialist.
“The thing that is particularly concerning is, how is it going to take an already intense thinker about Nazi ideas and give them more of a community, more of a sense of belonging, more of a reinforcement of those beliefs, rather than creating the beliefs out of nowhere?”
The author of that Atlantic article, journalist Jonathan M. Katz, distills the key question clearly:
How long will writers such as Bari Weiss, Patti Smith, and George Saunders—and, for that matter, me—be willing to stake our reputations on, and share a cut of our revenue with, a company that can’t decide if Nazi blogs count as hate speech?
For me, the bottom line is that MacKenzie’s response offends me, and I cannot continue to earn money from a platform that characterizes Naziism as a difference of opinion. And, there are plenty of other email platforms out there; the same can’t be said of every platform I use.
To wit: I left Facebook years ago, and Instagram too (same company), because I was so disgusted by the ways it had been used to interfere with our democracy. But I came back during the pandemic, when these sites let me feel more connected to the lives of my friends and family members all over the world. Sure, I could have scheduled phone calls or Zoom calls (also mediated by companies driven by profit, not purpose) with each and every one of them. But in between raising a child, running a business, and trying to keep from losing my mind, the prospect of a quick scroll to see Katie’s latest painting and hear about the book Michelle just read, and the flowers that are cheering my mother-in-law, felt and frankly was a whole lot more possible than setting up one-on-one calls with each of them.
Am I complicit in lining the pockets of Meta, a company that has also helped Nazis profit? I am, and I hate it. But while I haven’t found an alternative to Facebook that helps me efficiently stay connected to friends and family all over the globe, there are plenty of other email platforms out there. Is this a pure moral stance? Admittedly not. Can I live with myself? Yes…for now.
Meanwhile, I am making plans to leave Substack as early as possible in the new year.
The larger issue for all of us to consider
To zoom out a bit: I’m writing about all this not only because I want to call out Substack, but also because the ethics of the platforms on which we publish is an important issue for the Mighty Forces community to be aware of. If we are going to continue to leverage the internet to share our voices, our stories, and our ideas, as a way of growing connection and impact in this world in crisis — and I fervently believe our democracy and planetary health depend on us doing just that — we need to be aware of the ethics (or lack thereof) of the companies that host and benefit from our publications.
Finding a “pure” place to publish is difficult, if not impossible. As I wrote last month,
….Biased algorithms, trolls, and other dangers pose a threat to the internet's true democratic potential, but we don't need to just take it lying down. We can consider it a sh*tty opening offer. We can work to solve the necessary technical challenges, and we can devote ourselves to getting more diverse people into tech leadership and creation and governance. We can be the change.
Many organizations, some of them my clients, are doing just that.
Long-term, increasing the diversity of those who create and govern the platforms we use is an enormous part of ensuring the healthiest and most just online conversation possible. Also enormously important: mobilizing more social change makers and artists to fill these platforms with constructive content, which means more people like you coming to see themselves not just as content consumers, but content producers (if you’ve ever posted to social media, guess what? you produced content!).
But that raises the question of what to do in the short-term, and when it’s time to leave a platform when publishing there feels too much like complicity in the harm it’s doing.
I admit that I’m unsure what the impact of my leaving Substack will be. I left Twitter when Elon Musk took over and immediately let Trump back onto the platform. It just felt too sickening to stay. Meanwhile, the man is still the GOP front-runner for 2024; did me leaving Twitter do anything to stop that? Or might more of us staying and flooding the place with thoughtful, constructive content have made more of a difference? — if not in stopping him, or changing the minds of his supporters, then at least in making ourselves feel more connected, heard, and seen?
But my conscience was, and is, such that I had to be part of sending a message to Musk that he couldn’t just do whatever he wanted with Twitter and see it continue to thrive. And a year later, Twitter, or “X,” is a has-been social media platform (as journalist Alex Kirshner writes in Slate, “Twitter, which is no longer called Twitter, is a sad shell of its former self by every conventional business metric available to the general public.”).
Thinking our choices online don’t matter is like thinking our vote doesn’t matter, or that the way we spend our money doesn’t matter. Me refusing to patronize a bar that serves Nazis isn’t going to put that bar out of business. But if we all join the boycott, and the bar owner’s income is on the line — well, that can make a difference, indeed.
I don’t hold myself up as perfect. I’m not sure what perfection even looks like when it comes to embracing the power of the internet to express ourselves as citizens in a democracy, when all of the internet’s platforms are run by private companies.
No matter what, I will not give up my fervent belief that a healthier and more constructive media ecosystem is not only necessary, but possible, and that it is up to each of us to be part of the solution.
What do you think about all of this? Where do you draw the line? What people or orgs do you see doing the important work of making social media, and all media, the healthier and more constructive space that our democracy so desperately needs?
I’ll leave you with a quote from a speech by Barack Obama, which summarizes my own feelings about social media so well — that to give up on social media is to give up on public life:
In the early days of the internet and social media, there was a certain joy at finding new ways to connect and organize and stay informed, there was so much promise. I know, I was there. And right now, just like politics itself, just like our public lives, social media has a grimness to it. We’re so fatalistic about the steady stream of bile and vitriol that’s on there. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, if we’re gonna’ succeed, it can’t be that way.
You are a mighty force -
Amanda