Substack Still Has A Nazi Problem (And Doesn't Care)
For several years Substack has been accused of coddling white supremacy and fascist ideology for cash. And despite several major scandals and a mass defection of ethical authors, there's little serious indication that's going to change.
Because the U.S. corporate press is dying (quite intentionally), many journalists and writers are increasingly shifting to newsletters, one of the last ways they can actually make a living by reaching out directly to a receptive audience.
When it comes to newsletter hosting, there's a growing number of current options, including Ghost (the platform this website is run on), Beehiiv, Kit, and WordPress. Arguably the biggest and most well known of these options is Substack, which currently has around 50 million users worldwide.
Most of the newsletters you currently read are likely hosted at Substack.
The problem: Substack's executive leadership have repeatedly proven to be craven opportunists who openly embrace extremist content from the likes of white supremacists and fascists in order to profit off of the engagement. When called out, they pretend they're just helpless, adorable, and noble defenders of free speech.
In early 2024, Journalist Jonathan Katz (who I recommend and runs his own newsletter, The Racket) wrote a damning Atlantic article examining how Substack was openly monetizing content from a growing roster of Nazis, fascists, and white supremacists:
At least 16 of the newsletters that I reviewed have overt Nazi symbols, including the swastika and the sonnenrad, in their logos or in prominent graphics. Andkon’s Reich Press, for example, calls itself “a National Socialist newsletter”; its logo shows Nazi banners on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, and one recent post features a racist caricature of a Chinese person. A Substack called White-Papers, bearing the tagline “Your pro-White policy destination,” is one of several that openly promote the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that inspired deadly mass shootings at a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, synagogue; two Christchurch, New Zealand, mosques; an El Paso, Texas, Walmart; and a Buffalo, New York, supermarket.
This was compounded by the fact that Substack wasn't just inadvertently hosting a lot of terrible people and looking the other way because they loved free speech, they were, at various points, actively seeking out and giving large cash advances to not just big names, but key players in the right wing trolling and asshole economy.
At the time, the revelation of white supremacist accounts on Substack caused an inflection point for journalists and journalism. Many ethical authors on the platform (like Marisa Kabas, whose newsletter The Handbasket I greatly recommend) organized a massive shift away to more ethical alternatives.
"From our perspective as Substack publishers, it is unfathomable that someone with a swastika avatar, who writes about “The Jewish question,” or who promotes Great Replacement Theory, could be given the tools to succeed on your platform. And yet you’ve been unable to adequately explain your position."
For its part, Substack responded by insisting it had removed some, but far from all, of the offending authors and newsletters. This was partnered with a public blog post by Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie, where he insisted the company just really loves free speech, and claimed (falsely) that "deplatforming" right wing extremism somehow only makes the problem worse:
We don't think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse. We believe that supporting individual rights and civil liberties while subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power.
This idea that you can "debate" fascists and white supremacists to any productive end has long been a lazy trope by people in tech mostly interested in monetizing the controversy engagement clicks created by the chaos. Debating a fascist is kind of like trying to develop an intimate emotional relationship with a running chainsaw, and data largely shows that deplatforming really does help.
You'll see similar "free speech loving" rhetoric from the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, who aren't interested in free speech so much as they are fans of speech they agree with. And even bigger fans of profiting off racial and partisan division free from any sort of operational accountability or content moderation.
This quest for engagement at all costs has, if you hadn't noticed, proven hugely cancerous online. It routinely hides behind claims of free speech that are as hollow as a Dollar Store fake chocolate Easter bunny. And it's increasingly being badly automated in some hugely problematic new ways.
The Guardian this week published another story illustrating how Substack is still lousy with Nazis and assorted white supremacist assholes. The reporting is odd, in that it skips over a lot of the history I outlined above (like the mass organized exodus of ethical writers), but it comes to the same old conclusion; namely that Substack is a safe haven for racist assholes and extremists:
"Among them are newsletters that openly promote racist ideology. One, called NatSocToday, which has 2,800 subscribers, charges $80 – about £60 – for an annual subscription, though most of its posts are available for free.
NatSocToday is understood to be run by a far-right activist based in the US and features a swastika, a symbol appropriated by the Nazi party in the 1920s to symbolise white supremacy, as its profile picture. The full name of the Nazi party was the National Socialist German Workers’ party."
When reached for comment by The Guardian, Substack this time around had nothing to say.
Over the last few years I've seen several new media ventures launched proudly on Substack as if none of this had ever happened. Many writers, scientists, and journalists clearly aren't aware of Substack's Nazi problem. Others just find the platform's tools and convivence a fair trade off for sagging principles.
It's an open question if big name creators have received cash advances with contract language prohibiting the acknowledgement of Substack's bad choices.
It's worth noting there's other reasons to leave Substack, including lax security standards, higher fees, greater restrictions, and general enshittification.
It's hard to practice what you preach and shop ethically in the modern era. Were we to avoid every company engaged in unethical and vile behavior, you'd be stuck carless, phoneless, and homeless in a yurt, subsisting largely on accumulated Goodwill leftovers (which admittedly does increasingly have its appeal).
But in this case not launching your journalism or scientific empire on the back of a company that openly embraces Nazis and white supremacists for money doesn't seem like that high of a bar for a person of conscience.