Substack faces user revolt over anti-censorship stance
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I pray Substack will confidently face this storm!
I am certain Substack has felt pressured to deplatform me, GoEl, Lift the Veil and all who are covering or have covered the Hamblin case in Utah.
This platform has held steady ever since I showed up and I am so proud of their clarity and courage when so many other spaces kicked me out for my “uncomfortable” truth bombs.
Since Talia Lavin was quoted in the article, here is a stack I crafted around her well funded pharmaganda.
Jenny Hatch
QUOTES:
Newsletter writers with thousands of subscribers threaten to leave platform, which says banning extremists makes things worse
The email newsletter service Substack is facing a user revolt after its chief executive defended hosting and handling payments for “Nazis” on its platform, citing anti-censorship reasons.
In a note on the site published in December, the chief writing officer, Hamish McKenzie, said the firm “doesn’t like Nazis”, and wished “no one held these views”.
But he said the company did not think that censorship – by demonetising sites that publish extreme views – was a solution to the problem, and instead made it worse.
Some of the largest newsletters on the service have threatened to take their business elsewhere if Substack does not reverse its stance…
…The site’s leadership team said: “As we face growing pressure to censor content published on Substack that to some seems dubious or objectionable, our answer remains the same: we make decisions based on principles not PR, we will defend free expression, and we will stick to our hands-off approach to content moderation.”
The service has also been criticised for the opaque way it runs its Substack Pro service, which recruits new writers to the platform by paying them a guaranteed advance on their first year of subscriptions. Substack has never revealed which authors it commissions, arguing that it is a commercial, rather than editorial, agreement.
A Substack spokesperson said on Tuesday that none of the “fringe voices” discussed by McKenzie in his note were members of Substack Pro.