The Substack 'Nazi bar' Debate

Criticizing Users for the Actions of the Platform Owners is Misplaced

**This is an aside from my normal content to address an ongoing argument, one which I think is leading otherwise well-intentioned people down a wrong path.

Recently, I had a brief back-and-forth with a couple of people on the social media site Mastodon about continuing to post on this platform, Substack. Now, to be clear, the exchange was conducted very courteously, which is why I created an account on that platform and left Twitter or X or whatever Musk calls it these days. In fact, that contributes to my point, which I will make in a moment. First, the three of us debated a user’s role in contributing to what some call the ‘Nazi bar’. To better couch the debate, the owners of Substack recently came under fire for allowing some people or groups to continue publishing on the site despite their penchant for promoting ‘Nazi’ (or, extremist) propaganda. Drawing even more ire, the owners further proclaimed they would not demonetize these types of accounts. Co-founder Hamish McKenzie had this to say:

I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views. But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.

My debate began when I responded to a post about this. I am not linking to the post because my goal here is not to judge any particular person or direct any nastiness their way, but here is what the person said:

Sometimes the ‘what’s wrong with substack’ crowd gets very defensive about people saying ‘I don’t like and won’t use substack’. I thought freedom and no moderation was the core tenet of your belief: it should extend to others’ freedom to dislike substack as well.

To this, I responded:

I agree with this. The vitriol seems to arise from either side when it becomes a judgment of whether someone else uses it or not. A microcosm of our political and social environment these days, it seems.

Another user chimed in:

Posting on [Substack] is, by definition, contributing to the Nazi bar. That term has a specific meaning; this post [referring to a linked article, not the above post] explains it and offers a reasonable alternative.

It is here where I fundamentally disagree. This dialogue, however, illustrates the various positions people have taken. One can distill them as follows:

• Substack allows Nazis, so I won’t subscribe or otherwise use the site.

• Substack allows Nazis, but I use it for non-Nazi related reasons and will continue to do so.

• Substack allows Nazis, so anyone who uses it for any reason supports Nazis.

The second position is obviously mine. Of the other two, I think the first one is reasonable while the last is objectively unfair. To make the third point, that user linked to an article titled Leaving the Nazi bar. The author of that article crafted the argument that, in my view, misconstrues the issue with a poorly chosen analogy. Here it is:

[I]f a Nazi is removed from a service, their right to free speech has not been infringed. They have the ability to publish on the web or to join a service where their content is tolerated. That kind of speech is simply not allowed in that particular place.

Think of the web as a series of living rooms. If you’re in my living room, I have the right to kick you out if you start being abusive to me or other people in the room. I get to set the rules in my space so that other people can feel safe to be there. Different people have different values, so their living rooms might have different rules. But I get to set mine.

I also get to decide which rooms I want to be in, and which rooms I want to invite other people into. I don’t have any interest in hanging out in a room with Nazis, and I certainly don’t have any interest in inviting my friends to hang out there with me. If I find that the owner of the living room allows people who make me or my friends feel unsafe — or, as is true in this case, pays them to hang out there, and makes money from their presence — I can use the law of two feet to leave.

The room analogy does not seem to fit here because it requires characterizing the entire Substack platform as a single room. This makes little sense to me because the user has a lot of control over what he/she sees or engages with on the site. I myself do not see Nazi content, and none of my several hundred subscribers have ever complained about seeing it either. An overwhelming majority of my audience only reads my content from their email, so they very likely see no other content on Substack. Moreover, as more than half of my audience is not American, few probably know much about whatever American Nazis are up to lately, and perhaps do not care even if they do. If a Nazi subscribes to my space and decides to try to bring their garbage with them, I can block them. In other words, unless I actively seek them out or allow them to stay once detected, there simply are no Nazis in my ‘room.’

Contrast that with Twitter, which apparently promotes such content over almost all else. I mentioned above about switching to Mastodon from Twitter. I did for several reasons. First, Mastodon is a federated platform meaning that it is neither centrally owned nor regulated. One can choose the instance upon which to build an account, and can equally choose to leave if that instance allows contemptible people to remain on it and post their racist or other reprehensible screeds. But, the user has choices while still engaging in the overall environment. Second, a benefit to non-centralized ownership means that no one person determines how the broader fediverse operates. Twitter, which is run by a criminal man-child, necessarily succumbs to whatever stupid whim strikes its boorish owner at any given time. It is a closed environment. Or, to use the above analogy, a single room. As a user, this unpredictability makes the platform less effective and therefore less desirable. Finally, the general operations of Twitter render it a security nightmare. Substack works much more like Mastodon than Twitter.

In any event, the point is that individual users should feel free to decide what matters to them when engaging with a platform, product, service, or whatever else. If the rule, as implied by the Mastodon commenter I noted above, is that we should criticize any person who engages with a company other people do not like, no one can reasonably use anything. For example, I find Boeing to be an utterly immoral, despicable company of late. Even if I vow never to fly in a Boeing jet ever again, who am I to criticize someone else for choosing to do the opposite? Despite my visceral contempt for Elon Musk, how am I justified in criticizing a user for participating on Twitter? It is reasonable to point out the flaws of whatever companies or services, but that is a different thing from condemning people for still using them.

We all make decisions based on a variety of very individualized circumstances. Do I like that Substack has decided neither to censor nor demonetize accounts that spew hate-filled nonsense? No. Could I change platforms? Yes. But doing so would be a considerable hardship and would probably disenfranchise many of my subscribers and followers. That some lousy accounts exist on this same platform that I use does not appear to bother my followers and does not interfere with what I do here. Moreover, many platforms benefit from contemptuous content and I hear scant protests against users of them (YouTube is a prime example). Does the moralist expect people to migrate every time their chosen platform suffers from the enshittification that plagues so many things these days? The basis for this type of argument seems to be that “if I don’t like it, you can’t use it.”

Glenn Loury put it perfectly:

Nazi speech may signal bad political values on the part of the speaker, but abandoning this platform because it refuses to ban Nazi speech would amount to endorsing the wrong-headed view that a certain kind of moral posturing is more important than the preservation of an open forum for the exchange of ideas.

You don’t have to like Substack. You can choose not to subscribe to Substack writers. You can elect not to read their work if posted there. But when you start telling other people what to do based on your dislike of the platform they use, or you judge their purported morality for failing to adopt your form of protest, you are telling people that your opinions matter more than theirs. This is not all that dissimilar from what the Nazis are doing.