I think this particular Nazi controversy has brought Twitter vocabulary and concepts into Substack and laid the foundation for calling for other groups of Substackers to be ousted.
Sorry but stopped reading at “obscuring key information.” Why give any journalist who does this the time of day? It’s obvious to some of us that the so-called Nazi problem is cover for a push to censor. For our own good - because we deplorables just can’t be trusted to vet information ourselves. Like it or not, this isn’t about what it seems to be about. It’s about the control of speech. Period. The ones who want to censor to save you from Nazis are the Nazis.
After twisting my brain into a pretzel, I think I finally understand what Newton believed he was saying. Essentially “we didn’t share the number in our reporting because we expected our complaint to Substack to spur a larger, platform-wide investigation of extremist content. That would, in turn, lead to *many more* ‘nazi’ Substacks than the original six we reported being removed from the platform, thus obscuring Platformer’s role in banning any individual site. Instead, they just looked at the ones we reported, banned the 5 of 6, and left us holding the bag.” This feels deeply unfair to him and is not the way he thought the situation would go, because he feels entitled to dictate the internal politics of media organizations like Substack and expected this to go down entirely on his terms.
Everyone knows this "Nazi Problem" bullshit is a Trojan horse. They know most people find those ideas aberrant, so they say they are just trying to get rid of the "Nazis" (all six of them). But once this precedent is set, they will apply these "content moderation" rules to achieve their real purpose--to crack down on dissent. The twitter files should have made this obvious. Like Freddie DeBoer wrote about, he's a self-proclaimed Marxist, but these people would find a way to call him a Nazi so they could shut him up. Seriously, who falls for this shit?
My father joined the Army Air Corps the day after Pearl Harbor. Made it through the war with Japan and Germany.
So I, like many others, know that Nazis wanted literally to kill a member of my family (who I love and admired all of my life and who I miss every day since he died in 2012).
We also have two Jewish grandsons. I need not say more about what Nazis did there.
But, I'm not afraid of Nazi speech. Let the insecure, not-very-smart people prattle on. Enough of us know that they are just making up for the fact that they are losers trying to finally "be" somebody. The best response to them is ridicule.
Banning this kind of speech gives it power, and I don't want to give anyone who believes this crap power. Make fun of them. Make jokes. They are wanting the power of making you upset, so turn the tables.
We draw the line at racist talk. But let others ramble on and display their ignorance. Let the rest of us deal with them--don't do it for us by banning them. And we basically deal with them by ignoring them---a fate worse than death for insecure people.
The only Nazis left are bottom-barrel mentally-handicapped barely functional schizo-posters. Their maximum ability to display “force” is to get together like a couple hundred guys with tiki torches. That’s the zenith of their power. It’s like how the bubonic plague takes out one or two people a year in the middle of the desert, sometimes, maybe, because they came across one rat that is still carrying it.
The idea that theoretically, somewhere a guy who probably jerks off to internet porn all day and lives in his mother’s basement makes enough money from substack to go out to Red Robin and buy a cheeseburger once every three months, is a direct threat to all people everywhere that has to be put down with zero tolerance is just absurd. This isn’t even a hard moral quandary about the trade-offs for speech protections.
I try to give people grace but I don’t see how this isn’t some naked manipulation by Katz and his allies to try to win over sympathy from people who are so triggered by the existence of racism anywhere, with no context that might allay their fears, that they’re likely to give him $5/mos to be their champion. That’s an ugly thing to say but I can’t simultaneously imagine someone this stupid and this capable having any other motive.
I really want substack to be the innovators of something like due process for the internet. We’re all too old to just be having stupid internet battles like this that don’t resolve into anything. If you accuse someone of something, they should get to know who you are and what specifically you are accusing them of. They should get a right to defend themselves. And someone/something other than a mob should get to adjudicate the dispute.
We can’t just continue to exist in an environment where power is only wielded when there’s a mob at the door. This is basic civics stuff, and if old people had been the first adopters of the internet, it would have been built in day one.
I started out on Usenet in the 1990s, which had porn and Nazis aplenty, and we just ignored them (through the snow, uphill both ways). I know that's significantly different because Usenet was genuinely decentralized and had no owner/publisher. But dammit, when I were a lass we just ignored Nazis, and we liked it.
I sort of sympathize with Newton here. Imagine trying to make a living writing about the "good fight" and spending hours trying to find "the Nazis." You can't then write an article saying "we really couldn't find more than a very tiny number of Nazis... it appears it's not really an issue." No one wants to hear that! So you have to somehow say "THERE ARE SOOO MANY NAZIS! WE MUST FIGHT THEM!!" That's way better, no?
Someone once mentioned that the SPLC had a similar problem: what do you do when you run out of Nazis or racists? You can either close shop or pivot. Often these groups choose the latter and pivot to whatever liberal cause cé·lè·bre they can find.
Newton and Katz care more that the media gatekeepers are a) losing power and b) less tolerant of antisocial behaviors from their ilk. “Nazis on Substack” is just a convenient pretext.
Just to clarify: is Hamas a "Nazi" organization? They certainly are very upfront about exterminating the Jews -- surely that qualifies as a (dis)honorable mention. There were associations between the Palestinians and the genuine, honest-to-God Nazis in WWII, and there was even a Palestinian SS regiment, so the historical connections are factual. And unlike the wimpy Nazis who are content to just publish a newsletter on Substack, Hamas really does go out and kill Jews.
If we're going to ban Nazis from Substack, should we also be banning Hamas supporters? How about people who downplay Hamas atrocities? How about people who are just critical of Israel? Lots of potential Nazis here, although of course they are on the wrong side of the tribal war.
"...and that he’s made the mistakes a lot of journalists have made when they aren’t careful enough to separate reporting from activism."
That should be enough to tell you that this has nothing to do with reality or news and is only a smear campaign. Frankly, this seems to be the case of all "news" generated by a certain subset of reporters and journalists. Activism has replaced the search for truth, and a lot of people who do not have the temperament to dispassionately report facts have gotten into the business. And this is having ripple effects all over the western world, from Russia to Trump.
I think this particular Nazi controversy has brought Twitter vocabulary and concepts into Substack and laid the foundation for calling for other groups of Substackers to be ousted.
Sorry but stopped reading at “obscuring key information.” Why give any journalist who does this the time of day? It’s obvious to some of us that the so-called Nazi problem is cover for a push to censor. For our own good - because we deplorables just can’t be trusted to vet information ourselves. Like it or not, this isn’t about what it seems to be about. It’s about the control of speech. Period. The ones who want to censor to save you from Nazis are the Nazis.
After twisting my brain into a pretzel, I think I finally understand what Newton believed he was saying. Essentially “we didn’t share the number in our reporting because we expected our complaint to Substack to spur a larger, platform-wide investigation of extremist content. That would, in turn, lead to *many more* ‘nazi’ Substacks than the original six we reported being removed from the platform, thus obscuring Platformer’s role in banning any individual site. Instead, they just looked at the ones we reported, banned the 5 of 6, and left us holding the bag.” This feels deeply unfair to him and is not the way he thought the situation would go, because he feels entitled to dictate the internal politics of media organizations like Substack and expected this to go down entirely on his terms.
Everyone knows this "Nazi Problem" bullshit is a Trojan horse. They know most people find those ideas aberrant, so they say they are just trying to get rid of the "Nazis" (all six of them). But once this precedent is set, they will apply these "content moderation" rules to achieve their real purpose--to crack down on dissent. The twitter files should have made this obvious. Like Freddie DeBoer wrote about, he's a self-proclaimed Marxist, but these people would find a way to call him a Nazi so they could shut him up. Seriously, who falls for this shit?
My father joined the Army Air Corps the day after Pearl Harbor. Made it through the war with Japan and Germany.
So I, like many others, know that Nazis wanted literally to kill a member of my family (who I love and admired all of my life and who I miss every day since he died in 2012).
We also have two Jewish grandsons. I need not say more about what Nazis did there.
But, I'm not afraid of Nazi speech. Let the insecure, not-very-smart people prattle on. Enough of us know that they are just making up for the fact that they are losers trying to finally "be" somebody. The best response to them is ridicule.
Banning this kind of speech gives it power, and I don't want to give anyone who believes this crap power. Make fun of them. Make jokes. They are wanting the power of making you upset, so turn the tables.
We draw the line at racist talk. But let others ramble on and display their ignorance. Let the rest of us deal with them--don't do it for us by banning them. And we basically deal with them by ignoring them---a fate worse than death for insecure people.
The only Nazis left are bottom-barrel mentally-handicapped barely functional schizo-posters. Their maximum ability to display “force” is to get together like a couple hundred guys with tiki torches. That’s the zenith of their power. It’s like how the bubonic plague takes out one or two people a year in the middle of the desert, sometimes, maybe, because they came across one rat that is still carrying it.
The idea that theoretically, somewhere a guy who probably jerks off to internet porn all day and lives in his mother’s basement makes enough money from substack to go out to Red Robin and buy a cheeseburger once every three months, is a direct threat to all people everywhere that has to be put down with zero tolerance is just absurd. This isn’t even a hard moral quandary about the trade-offs for speech protections.
I try to give people grace but I don’t see how this isn’t some naked manipulation by Katz and his allies to try to win over sympathy from people who are so triggered by the existence of racism anywhere, with no context that might allay their fears, that they’re likely to give him $5/mos to be their champion. That’s an ugly thing to say but I can’t simultaneously imagine someone this stupid and this capable having any other motive.
I really want substack to be the innovators of something like due process for the internet. We’re all too old to just be having stupid internet battles like this that don’t resolve into anything. If you accuse someone of something, they should get to know who you are and what specifically you are accusing them of. They should get a right to defend themselves. And someone/something other than a mob should get to adjudicate the dispute.
We can’t just continue to exist in an environment where power is only wielded when there’s a mob at the door. This is basic civics stuff, and if old people had been the first adopters of the internet, it would have been built in day one.
I started out on Usenet in the 1990s, which had porn and Nazis aplenty, and we just ignored them (through the snow, uphill both ways). I know that's significantly different because Usenet was genuinely decentralized and had no owner/publisher. But dammit, when I were a lass we just ignored Nazis, and we liked it.
I sort of sympathize with Newton here. Imagine trying to make a living writing about the "good fight" and spending hours trying to find "the Nazis." You can't then write an article saying "we really couldn't find more than a very tiny number of Nazis... it appears it's not really an issue." No one wants to hear that! So you have to somehow say "THERE ARE SOOO MANY NAZIS! WE MUST FIGHT THEM!!" That's way better, no?
Someone once mentioned that the SPLC had a similar problem: what do you do when you run out of Nazis or racists? You can either close shop or pivot. Often these groups choose the latter and pivot to whatever liberal cause cé·lè·bre they can find.
Newton and Katz care more that the media gatekeepers are a) losing power and b) less tolerant of antisocial behaviors from their ilk. “Nazis on Substack” is just a convenient pretext.
Given the rapidly rising popularity of Substack, it was inevitable that legacy media outlets, such as The Atlantic, would start issuing hit pieces.
I'm reminded of a certain congresscritter from the 50's who had a list of 57 "subversives".
I've never read the word "Nazi" so much in one month.
That's the problem with this platform: all anyone talks about is Nazis.
This Newton dude's constant evasion of Jesse's questions is hilarious.
Just to clarify: is Hamas a "Nazi" organization? They certainly are very upfront about exterminating the Jews -- surely that qualifies as a (dis)honorable mention. There were associations between the Palestinians and the genuine, honest-to-God Nazis in WWII, and there was even a Palestinian SS regiment, so the historical connections are factual. And unlike the wimpy Nazis who are content to just publish a newsletter on Substack, Hamas really does go out and kill Jews.
If we're going to ban Nazis from Substack, should we also be banning Hamas supporters? How about people who downplay Hamas atrocities? How about people who are just critical of Israel? Lots of potential Nazis here, although of course they are on the wrong side of the tribal war.
This was excellent reporting.
Substack is such a treasure, and I resent the careless, destructive, distracting, purely performative virtue signaling of the agitators.
"...and that he’s made the mistakes a lot of journalists have made when they aren’t careful enough to separate reporting from activism."
That should be enough to tell you that this has nothing to do with reality or news and is only a smear campaign. Frankly, this seems to be the case of all "news" generated by a certain subset of reporters and journalists. Activism has replaced the search for truth, and a lot of people who do not have the temperament to dispassionately report facts have gotten into the business. And this is having ripple effects all over the western world, from Russia to Trump.