Checking my cellphone bill the other day, I found myself wondering just how many Nazis use the same service as me. Probably hundreds, since I use one of the three biggest cell providers in the country. What were the ethics, I wondered, of paying a company that was being used to spread hate?
If this question seems somewhat absurd to you, you probably haven’t been following the controversy over Nazis on Substack.
Substack is a platform that publishes email newsletters for independent authors — including my husband, who writes a weekly newsletter about home bartending. Thousands of authors use the platform, and, collectively, they reach tens of millions of subscribers. Almost none of the authors, or the subscribers, are Nazis. But a few appear to be either Nazis or Nazi-adjacent, which led Jonathan Katz to write in the Atlantic in November that there were “scores of white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi newsletters on Substack.”
Furious reactions and counterreactions ensued. A bunch of Substack authors banded together to pressure the platform to ditch the racists, with an implied threat to leave (as several users later did). A different group urged Substack to leave them be, because “Substack shouldn’t decide what we read.” Substack removed a few of the worst accounts but otherwise remained committed to minimalist moderation. It was all quite reminiscent of the social media moderation wars of the past ten years.
Yet there was a key difference because, on social media, people arguing for bans on various kinds of offensive content often voiced reasonable fears of harassment by users who bombarded them with grotesque slurs. On Substack, you had to actively seek out Nazi content, so the Nazis were mostly talking to one another. That distilled the argument to the question: When and how should private companies be expected to join society’s fight against hate?
Hence my musings about my cellphone: : Should I pay for service from a big company that I’m pretty sure does business with Nazis — even if that number is small — and by doing business with them, provides them a means to share their noxious views? Should AT&T or Verizon or T-Mobile shut the objectionable accounts down?
To the people who demanded Substack shut down offensive accounts, this sort of question seems ridiculous: We are dealing with actual white supremacists who are using a newsletter platform to spread the most toxic, disgusting forms of hate. Let’s focus on getting rid of the Nazis, and worry about these hazy theoreticals later, okay?
I have some sympathy for this argument. Though I’m pretty much a free-speech absolutist, I find myself tempted to carve out a special, one-time exception for Nazis, especially because we’re talking about rules set by private companies, not the government.
But I’m unwilling to go down this road without a clear sense of where, exactly, all this will stop. Swastikas, obviously, but what about white supremacists who don’t identify as Nazis? What about people who don’t identify as white supremacists but just seem really racist?
The debates over these kinds of bans have yet to produce any kind of workable framework for deciding which companies should do what to whom, and which companies should keep providing services, even to Nazis. Sure, when pressed, the organizers can describe how, say, Substack is different from the phone company — but without firm general principles to start from, that’s all they’re doing, describing how Substack is different from the phone company.
And in practice, the quest to de-platform Nazis has gone pretty deep into the infrastructure of the internet and, for that matter, daily life. The Daily Stormer, a Nazi website, has been repeatedly denied service by companies that provide basic internet services such as routing traffic and connectivity. Activists have successfully pressured payment processors and banks to close the accounts of white supremacists, including the infamous Richard Spencer. Trying to cut people off from the financial system doesn’t really seem all that far from trying to cut them off from the cellphone network.
I suspect many of my readers are thinking “Who cares? They’re Nazis.” But just as I don’t think it stops with Substack, I have no faith that it stops with Nazis either. Conservative Christians, anti-vaxxers and others whose views stop well short of “American Reich” keep making it on the list of people who should be de-platformed, debanked and otherwise deleted. As I followed the arguments over Substack’s Nazi problem, it was striking how often and how quickly the discussion about Nazis would segue into discussion about their prior refusal to ban gender-critical or anti-vaccine writers.
You might not be sad to lose the anti-vaxxers or the transphobes, either. But notice that we’re now talking about views that are broadly held, even if you think they shouldn’t be. And this is where the lack of limiting principles has become a problem, not just for me but also for the would-be censors. Nazis are a tiny, noxious minority, and most of the rest of America would be glad to do anything it takes to shut them up forever. But they’ll still think twice if doing so means handing the would-be censors tools they might use to silence the much larger number of people who disagree with them.
and the milk! The gas station milk is only 3 buck! I thought that was diesel at first but no its milk dammit!
