Amid Nazi content controversy, Substack subscription network loses writers
Tech publication Platformer is latest to announce its departure over a failure to remove hateful ideology
Amid ongoing controversy surrounding Nazi content, the Substack subscription network lost one of its leading publications on Friday as journalist Casey Newton announced that his tech blog, Platformer, was leaving for a different website.
In a post on his blog, Newton explained that his decision to move Platformer off of Substack came as a result of the subscription network’s failure to sufficiently address Nazi content posted on its platform.
The controversy began in November when The Atlantic published an article about Substack allowing the publication of and profiting from white supremacist and antisemitic content.
Newton explained that this did not immediately make him want to leave the service and that he did his own research to better understand Substack’s policies before reaching the decision.
In their research, Newton and his colleagues found seven publications that explicitly supported Nazi views and called for violence against Jews and other groups. They then passed them on to the Substack management by which time one had already been removed.
Newton made it clear that while they only flagged seven publications, there were many more that advocated for the great replacement theory and “other violent ideologies.”
He added that Substack had promised to remove five of the remaining publications and in the future “regard explicitly Nazi and pro-Holocaust material to be a violation of their existing policies,” but on Tuesday, it put out a statement merely saying that it was working on better moderation so that users could “refine the terms of their own experience on the platform.”
By then, several other publications had already left the platform citing the lack of a clear policy against pro-Nazi content.
Newton explained that Substack’s statement contradicted what the co-founders had told him personally, leading him to make the decision to leave the platform which keeps 10 percent of the revenue from its publications’ paid subscribers.
“The company’s defense boils down to the fact that nothing that bad has happened yet,” said Newton. “But we have seen this movie before, from Alex Jones to anti-vaxxers to QAnon, and will not remain to watch it play out again.”
Platformer was founded by Newton in 2020 as an independent publication “devoted to exploring the intersection of technology platforms and society.” The publication has more than 170,000 subscribers.
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