Just the Business won't side with censorship

A controversy with strong New Zealand connections has blown up in recent weeks about this platform, Substack, involving censorship and whether it should tolerate being used to publish newsletters with Nazi sympathies.

The controversy began with an article by Jonathan Katz published in Atlantic magazine under the headline: “Substack has a Nazi problem.” You can find it here, although most of it is behind a paywall: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-extremism-nazi-white-supremacy-newsletters/676156/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

In the article, Katz noted that Substack was founded in 2017 and was designed to allow writers to connect directly with subscribers willing to pay for their work, freeing them from dependence on major publishers. In March last year, it had more than 17,000 paid writers.

Yours truly plans to join them this year, Substack having allowed me to build a sufficiently large audience since August last year to make my Substack, Just the Business, financially viable.

Katz said he had discovered “at least 16” publications on Substack that “have overt Nazi symbols, including the swastika and the sonnenrad, in their logos or in prominent graphics.

“Substack has not only been hosting writers who post overtly Nazi rhetoric on the platform; it profits from many of them,” Katz said.

Substack terms

Substack hosts free publications for nothing – this has allowed me to build the readership of Just the Business at no cost, other than my own labour.

Now that I'm about to start charging, Substack will keep 10% of what I earn, part of its standard terms. For me, that's an outstandingly good deal.

However, a number of Substack writers are now chosing to leave the Substack platform, citing Substack's refusal to censor said Nazi publications.

That's not exactly what Substack has said: This was its initial response to an open letter, signed by 247 Substack writers, from New Zealander and Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie:

Essentially, McKenzie said Substack would remove accounts if they made credible threats of violence, thus violating one of Substack's terms of service, but otherwise his company believes that censorship doesn't make this problem go away but instead “makes it worse.”

Substack then received support from more than 100 other Substack writers, including famous names such as Bari Weiss and Richard Dawkins, approving Substack's policy and calling on it to continue with its mostly pro-free speech and hands-off stance.

But technology writer Casey Newton of The Platformer asked Substack to reconsider and cited six publications which Newton considered problematic and Nazi.

Substack reconsiders

Substack replied that it had reconsidered how it interprets its existing policies and that had resulted in it removing five of the publications Newton had cited.

Substack said this didn't represent a reversal of its previous stance, but rather the result of reconsidering how it interprets its existing policies.

Substack is also looking at making it easier for writers and readers to alert it to problematic publications.

This wasn't good enough for Newton and he has since removed The Platformer from Substack so I can't give you a link to it.

Newton had published on Substack since 2020 and acknowledges that he “felt a personal connection to Substack's co-founders, who believed that Platformer would succeed even before it had a name.”

Up to the day he left, Newton had increased his subscribers from about 24,000 to more than 170,000 and that has allowed him to also create new jobs in journalism.

Back in NZ, Webworm's David Farrier, who started publishing on Substack when NZ was in its first covid lockdown in 2020, is asking his subscribers for feedback on whether he should depart Substack too.

Strangely, to me at least, Farrier says he had a major problem in asking people to pay him for his work: “It felt icky,” he says.

Providing financial freedom

But the fact that Substack accomodates both paid and free publications won him over, Farrier says, and the 10% of his readers who do pay now “makes Webworm a sustainable job, where I can afford things like legal opinions and paying guest writers. As a side dish, it's also allowed me flexibility in my life to chase other projects and documentaries with less fear.”

Farrier notes Substack's move to expel “a bunch of Nazis” but says that he is still actively exploring alternative platforms which “have a more active moderation process.”

Farrier's piece is here:

When Good Dogs Do Bad Things

Yet another Kiwi publication, A halfling's view, https://substack.com/@djhdcj has weighed in on the issue with a column headed: Censors are trying to trick you into thinking Substack has a “Nazi problem.”

Writers Zaid Jilani and Alex Gutentag noted that the six Substack publications Newton had found had 29 paid subscribers between them compared with the more than two million paying subscribers to various Substack publications.

“Given the tone of the protestations from Newton, Katz and others, you'd think that Substack was aflow in neo-Nazi content.”

Halfling also looked at a number of the Nazi publications Katz had found and concluded they have gained very little traction.

Staying on the X cesspool

It also notes that many of the writers threatening to leave Substack still have X, formerly Twitter, accounts and it's well publicised what a cesspool X has become since Elon Musk paid US$44 billion for in October 2022 (I'm not and never will be on X).

Halfling also notes that libraries all over the world stock copies of Hitler's Mein Kampf and Mao Zedong's Little Red Book and that the first amendment to America's constitution disallows the US government from consoring any point of view, even unpopular or extreme ones – Substack is based in San Francisco.

“Substack pages run by Jewish and gay Americans – groups loathed by white nationalists and neo-Nazis – are among the platform's most popular destinations.”

Halfling notes that the rise of the Nazi's wasn't hampered by a raft of laws in Germany restricting speech, disproving claims that better censorship would have prevented Hitler and the Holocaust.

Halfling takes the same view that our own Free Speech Union

https://www.fsu.nz/

takes, that the best answer to extreme speech is more speech.

And that's the view I'm taking too. Nobody is forcing anybody reading Substacks to read any they object to.

As Voltaire is reputed to have said: “I find your opinions indefensible and myself totally unable to agree with them—but I will defend to the death your right to express them.”

Nazis and transphobics

As readers who have followed my work will know, BusinessDesk censored a column I wrote in 2022 which criticised the publisher NZME, which owns BusinessDesk and the NZ Herald, for refusing to run ads for the lobby group Stand Up For Women.

The ad consisted of the Oxford Dictrionary's definition of the word woman: adult human female, and NZME was cowed by the trans lobby's objections.

I wrote about it recently here: https://justthebusinessjennyruth.substack.com/p/should-nzme-keep-caving-to-the-thugs

NZ's mainstream media disgracefully amplified the same trans lobby voices when Posie Parker, aka Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, visited NZ with her message that women don't have penises and her rallying cry of “let women speak.”

Shamefully, our media labelled Britain-based Keen-Minshull a Nazi on nothing but the flimsy evidence that white nationalists had turned up to her events in Australia and some eroneous entries in Wikipedia.

The same Nazi label has been applied more recently to British singer-songwriter Louise Distras for saying that trans women are men, a statement of plain biological fact that has led to her being “cancelled” by Britain's music industry.

For that, she was arrested by the Northumbria police under Britain's “hate crimes” legislation, photographed and fingerprinted, and interrogated for hours until the police eventually released her, saying she had committed no crime.

This was in the context of Distras trying to talk about the abuse she had suffered as a woman in the music industry.

I think it's no coincidence that Farrier's missive to his readers also complained that he was aware that “other shitty newsletters existed on Substack. Newsletters that are openly transphobic (and exist only to be transphobic).”

Terfs unite!

No doubt you'll have realised by now that I'm what the trans lobby labels a “terf,” a trans-exclusionary radical feminist.

I regard the term terf as hate speech, but the last thing I want is for it to be banned.

Like my far more exalted sisters, JK Rowling and Martina Navratilova, I'm more than capable of answering this hate speech with my own speech.

I dispute that the term transphobic applies to any of us – we're not afraid of trans people.

We just don't agree with men who say they're women being allowed into women's intimate spaces or into women's sports.

I don't agree that it's possible to change sex. Anymore than it's possible for me, a woman of Irish and Scottish descent, and a bit of other mongrel, to become Chinese.

And sex is not “assigned at birth”: your sex is determined at conception and is immutable.

There is no such thing as being born in the “wrong” body. No body is “wrong.”

If a man wishes to dress as a woman, that's entirely his right. But his rights end when they start to clash with women's hard-won rights.

But what a regressive anti-women and anti-gay thing this trans ideology is.

As a feminist, through my entire life I have fought against restrictive gendered roles for both men and women, exemplified by the slogan: girls can do anything.

But trans ideology would have you believe being a woman is simply a matter of putting on a suit of clothes.

Enough of that. I'm staying with Substack.

I hope that those of you who have pledged to pay to subscribe to Just the Business, and at least some of my other subscribers, will remain subscribers once my paywall goes up.

You can expect my first column of 2024 on Tuesday, Jan 30.