Let's End the Self-Defeat of Platform Shaming
Everything has a Nazi Problem
With all that’s been happening in the news lately—and that’s a lot—the last thing I have patience for is discussion about independent journalist Mehdi Hasan being a Nazi.
Hasan has copped this from every side of politics. You don’t get to be a left-wing British-Indian-American Muslim floating between mainstream and independent journalism without exploding some heads trying to define you politically. His positions on Gaza have his right-wing opponents threatening him snidely with pager bomb semi-jokes.
But he’s been facing the Hitler accusations from the left as well. Whenever Hasan opens his mouth in criticism of Elon Musk, progressives are quick to point out that he’s building his media empire, Zeteo, on the Substack platform, which to many is kind of the modern equivalent of borrowing Goebbels’ typewriter.
Anil Dash, whose recent life mission seems largely oriented around full-throatedly atoning for being a serial tech CEO, is a quick-draw sheriff on Bluesky, identifying and discrediting Substack-havers on sight. But I don’t want to pick on him, he’s just one of the louder voices among many progressives who will not abide having a good healthy rage discussion ruined when some guy comes along and poops a link to his Substack on it.
And I get it. These things are like the Nespresso of blogs. They all kinda look the same and everybody has one. It’s quick and it’s convenient and it’s easy for people to use without any kind of technical or design or branding or promotional knowledge.
Easy to use is also almost a universal shorthand for low quality. If your service allows people to set up and start broadcasting their opinions to the world in five minutes then it’s going to produce a lot of opinions that took far less than five minutes of thought.
But there are plenty of already famous and professional writers and authors on Substack--both of Stephen King's sons are here, as well as
and and a bunch of other normal guys who maybe just want to run a side blog without realising that they are now a literal, actual Nazi.
The Nazi association of course comes from Substack management’s regular and consistent tendency to trip over their own dicks when it comes to PR disasters. I was shrieking at them just recently about their latest fuckup. The specific accusation of Nazism dates back to the end of 2023 when they gave a catastrophic response to media reports about the prevalence of white supremacy content hosted on their platform, but throughout the year the hits kept coming. Almost one year to the day of the initial Nazigate fiasco they again dropped their pants, turned around, and with dramatic and deliberate poise, showed their entire ass by announcing an official professional partnership with one of their flagship publications, Bari Weiss’ The Free Press, a notoriously partisan right wing garbage tabloid. They might as well have said they were going all in for Breitbart.
And for some reason the grievances regularly bring up the prominent presence on the platform of Richard Hanania, one of the co-founders of the Alt-Right movement who now writes at length on race and IQ pseudoscience.
Substack management could very easily stop stepping on rakes every five minutes and just kind of sit back and quietly run their business like Reddit admins who only emerge from their burrows to make a shitty announcement once a decade, long after everyone has forgiven and forgotten the last one. But techbros just gotta slurp that techbro lemonade. They gotta slurp it up. It’s like a tic. And I don’t want to make this about me but anecdotes are what I’ve got and every time one of these guys says something aloud that they could have used their inside voice for my subscriber count craters and I have to abstain from sharing any Substack links for an undefined number of weeks due to embarrassment.
So here’s the thing about Nazis, platforms, and my evolving thoughts about all of it in the age of Elon Musk running a fire sale on the whole of western democracy.
I write an identical version of this same newsletter on both Substack and Ghost, and each week I tell every single person reading this that they’re more than welcome to sign up to either platform to receive the exact same content. Initially, I decided to do this after a bunch of people told me that they would sign up as paid subscribers if only they could support me on a non-Nazi platform.
The initial hurdles were that both of the other major Substack competitors (Ghost and Beehiiv) take an upfront fee from the author rather than a cut of subscriptions, and you can’t really tell which one is going to be better than the other until you either roll the dice with one, pay the toll, and either regret it or not. I went with Ghost, ultimately, my scales being tipped by the unique premise that they might ultimately decentralise the platform, which I think is essential for the future of the internet.
I’ve been very clear for the past three months that anyone who doesn’t want a cent of their money going to Substack is free to join me at Ghost instead, and guess how many of those aforementioned conscientiously objecting potential supporters have followed through with their pledge? Here’s a clue: I can count them on one… uh… finger.
Now I want to be clear, this is not about money. This column is free and it always will be, I just want my voice to get out and operating across multiple platforms maximalises that. I don’t regret spreading onto a second platform, but for now that has more to do with the fact that I fear Substack will collapse and some sort of contingency really seems wise.
I’m no longer particularly bothered by the ethical ramifications of maintaining a presence on Substack, and to explain why, I need to talk a bit about the political history of the British Indian Ocean Territory.
No, seriously. I promise that this will make sense but I need you to bear all the way with me here.
The British Indian Ocean Territory is the formal name for the Chagos Islands, situated around halfway between Africa and Indonesia. It’s an American military base, though the islands themselves are owned by the UK. Since the 60s it’s been run in partnership between the two nations and it has no indigenous population. It’s not because nobody ever lived there, it’s because Britain literally did an ethnic cleansing to get rid of the native inhabitants so that the Americans could have some privacy.
Privacy, incidentally, in an American secret military context, means CIA torture programs. I mean, “processing of high-value detainees.”
How this becomes relevant to anything is that the British Indian Ocean Territory is the administrator of the .io top level web domain. Every country and many little not-really-a-country territories have these and the BIOT is no different, it’s the bit at the end of a URL that some websites choose to add to denote what country they operate in.
But there aren’t any websites that operate out of the BIOT. There’s nobody there but a bunch of jarheads. Still, unlike many domains of this type, the .io is available to purchase for anyone who for whatever reason feels like haunting their own company with the spectre of an unapologetic genocide.
While we’re talking about haunting with a spectre:
The .io domain is one of the most expensive accessories that a website can attach to its URL, and there’s no clear answer as to why so many websites in the techbro sector shell out top dollar for it as opposed to a simple .com. The best answer anyone has is that it is just trendy.
YouTuber Fredo Rockwell tried to trace where all that money goes but the only conclusive answer he could find was that it doesn’t go to the UK government. Any further probing started to get creepy in a black helicopters sort of way.
So look, if a website that enables white supremacists to directly fund their work is a problem then surely a website that most likely directly funds a CIA black ops torture camp is a problem, but the moral failures here are light years from each other for most people. Why is that?
You might say that actually the real issue where Substack is concerned is the material itself. By giving shitty people the means and the platform to spread their ideas, and even proliferate it algorithmically, or in the Bari Weiss scandal directly partner with these people and promote them, you’re doing something much worse than simply being a node in their revenue stream, which is hell of difficult to avoid when living in capitalism.
Then, of course, consider one of the first things I see if I look at Ghosts internal recommendation engine is this:
I don’t know what the hell Yardeni QuickTakes is but if they’re not a bunch of shitbags then I’m happy to see that they’re doing marginally better than Quillette.
Quillette aren’t Nazis, but if Bari Weiss is a dealbreaker then this is roughly on par. They’re a rag that launders reactionary “just asking questions” type slop to the masses like “Why are blacks the only ethnic group routinely and openly encouraged to nurse stale grievances back to life?”
Oh and look at this! Look who I found!
It’s Richard Hanania, on Ghost. Being promoted, front page, via Quillette.
As I said, I went with setting up a Ghost mirror for my column on a nearly coin-flip decision and now I have people telling me I was supposed to pick Beehiiv. D’oh!
Beehiiv is an aggressive and immodest competitor to Substack and they certainly made a lot of hay out of the Nazis-on-Substack issue. Many if not most of the big titles who announced their departure from Substack moved here. It’s got a hip and funky vibe to it. Their techbro owner is a surfer!
Beehiiv also makes a big fat deal out of their partnership with Shopify, the trendy online store that makes selling your product fun and easy. Except, oh… oh God.
Shopify has a Nazi problem.
I posit it’s a much bigger Nazi problem than Substack ever had, because I get the strong vibe that the guys running the place might kinda actually be Nazis. Like, in a two-o’clock salute, Elon Musk seal of approval kind of way.
So what is this all about, Beehiiv? What are we calling this? What are we doing here?
From what I can tell, the phenomenon of platform shaming has little to do with an actual ethical judgment on using a certain platform. The whole “ethical consumption under capitalism” paradox does come into it, and I know there are still different levels of unethical inside that frame, but you can go mad staring into this void. I looked at Substack’s two biggest competitors and found evil shit in both.
The most notable thing about platform shaming, for me, is that it isn’t even consistently applied. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone rip into Parker Molloy for having a prominent Substack publication, or Matt Binder. The vitriol only seems to be reserved for crucial moments like when Mehdi Hasan says something too liberal.
That’s the essence of it. It’s not an ethical standard, it’s a cudgel. I almost never use the term Ad Hominem because of how often and incorrectly it’s thrown about in online debate-me contexts, but it’s properly applied here, if you’re dissing someone for using Substack from the comfort of your Beehiiv publication where the next blog over from you is selling authentic swastika armbands with free shipping if you buy in bulk.
And why do we do this to each other? When are we going to accept and deal with the fact that all the modes of communication open to us online are gatekept by douchy at best, evil at worst, techbro overlords, each and every one of them somewhere on the right-wing hate-nerd spectrum?
These guys don’t even need to censor us. We do a great enough job of that ourselves. Few who aren’t deep inside Elon Musk’s cult will dare say out loud that they still have an active Twitter account, but all of the alternatives go through periodic scandals in which they dance close to a left wing boycott in an environment where we’re perilously close to boycotting ourselves into radio silence. Bluesky is the most popular thing right now, but only a few months ago seemingly the whole platform turned upside down when sometime-journalist, all-the-time-bonehead troll Jesse Singal signed up an account and the trust and safety admins just kind of let him stay.
Absolutely fair shake: Singal, who has made his whole journalism career on fighting the dreaded “gender ideology,” was definitely engaged in a trolling campaign here. Knowing full well that Bluesky had a reputation for serving as a safe space for minorities, and transgender people in particular, who had been driven aggressively out of Elon Musk’s fiefdom, Singal knew that his presence would make waves, and he embarked on a “colonization” project in which he used his Twitter(!!) account to offer his fans free subscriptions to his Substack(!!!) newsletter if they signed up to Bluesky and followed him, so he could record the backlash and use it as material for an attention seeking whinge on Bari Weiss’ Free Press(!!!!!!!!).
The mainstream media, already at this point sucking delicately on Elon Musk’s toes, had a good laugh about it. Singal was acting in bad faith, to be sure, but as the argument goes, he never broke any of the rules of the platform, and “known to many as a bigot” and “acting in bad faith on Twitter” are not mentioned anywhere in the rules of Bluesky. Jesse Singal is an easy name to look up, but it’s difficult to imagine how intensive vetting and making value judgments on individual users by researching their historical activity on other platforms and records of their personal and professional lives is going to work at scale when you’re a millions-strong social media platform rather than, you know, a book club.
Still, the intrusion of one single (Singal) individual left many people morosely taking to the platform to ask: “Where now? Where do we go now when we add this forum to the blacklist?”
As the politics of much of the world start to shift sharply in a terrible direction and the relative safety of liberal democracies slips gradually away from us, what the hell do we think we’re doing policing each other’s modes of communication like this? When the right has seized ownership of almost every megaphone, we’re just leaving them on the ground, looking for the one that hasn’t got Weiss or Hanania germs on it, settling often for just rolling a piece of cardboard into a cone and shouting into that instead.
At this point it feels like even smoke signals are frowned upon for the carbon pollution and the only ethical way to write is to jot it onto a graham cracker and then eat it.
I don’t know about you but I reckon we should commandeer every single megaphone we can get our hands on right now.
Substack has a Nazi problem. Ghost has a genocide problem. Bluesky has a Singal problem. I’m using all three and I don’t think this should be my problem.
Nobody Cares About Truth, Only the Better Story
If you’d asked me at two particular phases of my life, and my maturity, what my favorite book was, I would have told you either Life of Pi or American Psycho. You might think that’s a hell of a swing in literary taste, but then again, both books have basically the same theme. Also, it kinda describes what’s wrong with all of us.
At least bluesky has that lovely nuclear-class block / detach comment option. For all its other bumps & lumps, at least not feeding the trolls has never been easier <3.
I'm at the same point, myself. Got raked over the coals by the big anti-Substack crew (including Anil Dash) for pointing out that Ghost doesn't work for those of us who don't monetize our blogging. Meanwhile, I mirror everything on my website, Dreamwidth, and Ko-fi.
I left Substack for ten months and the price I paid was lack of visibility, and no new followers. All those people loudly advocating that people leave? How many of them actually turned around and supported me? Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Rien. I'll put up those other links on social media, but what gets the clicks?
You guessed it. Substack.