Jonathan Katz is on a campaign to de-platform speech he doesn’t like from Substack.
On November 28, The Atlantic published a piece by Katz in which he accused Substack of making money from Nazi content by means of the percentage of subscription revenue it collects from monetized substacks on the platform. The piece alleged that there were “cores of white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi newsletters on Substack” — but Katz has consistently failed to produce more than a handful of examples. Further review by other substackers has uncovered a handful of substacks that Katz did mention by name, but none of these contain “white supremacist, neo-Confederate [or] explicitly Nazi” content. While there do appear to be a number of unmonetized whote supremacist substacks, obviously Substack is not making money from these, and they do not appear to have a significant volume of reader traffic on the site. In fact, the lack of evidence of a proliferation of monetized content of the type Katz claims in the Atlantic piece has led others to suggest that his actual targets are simply writers with whom he strongly disagrees, such as Matt Taibbi and Razib Khan.
Nevertheless, Katz succeeded in gathering a crowd of complainers in the wake of his piece in The Atlantic, and an “open letter” to Substack’s management, supported by a couple of hundred substackers, urging them to clarify their position on the platforming issue. This was then followed by a separate “open letter” signed by around a hundred different substackers, urging management to do the reverse and retain Substack’s existing policy of very narrow content prohibitions (pornography, sex workers, specific encitement to violence) while emphasizing the ability of the site’s community of readers to censor their own content consumption, and of writers to moderate expression from readers on their respective substacks.
On Thursday December 21, Substack’s leadership, via Hamish McKenzie clarified in writing that
Our content guidelines do have narrowly defined proscriptions, including a clause that prohibits incitements to violence. We will continue to actively enforce those rules while offering tools that let readers curate their own experiences and opt in to their preferred communities. Beyond that, we will stick to our decentralized approach to content moderation, which gives power to readers and writers. While not everyone agrees with this approach, many people do, as indicated by @Elle Griffin’s post in defense of decentralized moderation on Substack, which was signed and endorsed by hundreds of writers on the platform, including some of the leading names in journalism, literature, and academia (see Elle’s post below). Even if we were in a minority of one, however, we would still believe in these principles.
This response has not gone over well with Katz and his supporters, predictably, yet it is critical at this time that Substack’s management understand how important it is that they in fact hold to this position, and do not succumb to the kind of internet pressure tactics, brigading, bad-mouthing and the rest of it that we all now know very well from our collective experience online over the last decade or so.
I am no supporter of white nationalists, Nazis, racists or similar perspectives — I don’t read their material, and to be honest I never have been interested in it at all, for reasons that are probably similar to just about everyone else. If Substack were to remove all of the offending substacks tomorrow, it would not impact me, my reading habits, or my life otherwise, even a tiny bit.
But I recognize that Substack’s primary value as a platform lies in the freedom it provides to writers and readers, alike, to write and read content that is not generally available in the mainstream media for various reasons — some of them economic, some substantive, and some political. No approach to content moderation online is perfect, but the approach taken by Substack of having narrow content prohibitions and otherwise pushing moderation down to the level of the writers and readers themselves is by far the best solution to the problem we have seen to date.
The alternative offered by Katz and his supporters, by contrast, resurrects the grim specter of top-down content moderation, which has no logical endpoint: instead it quickly devolves into an unstable situation where what is permitted and not permitted to be expressed by writers is subject to constant change and revision based on the current cultural and political preferences of those who have arrogated the censor’s power to themselves. Substack has made the right call here in continuing to resist this temptation, and I strongly encourage the leadership of the site to stay the course on this critical issue. Failing to do so would dramatically reduce the value of the entire enterprise of Substack, and transform it into yet another branch of the mainstream media, which is precisely the opposite of what makes Substack worthwhile to begin with.