email from Nathan (Item 10)

On Substack drama

This bit of writing will relate closely to the last, but after finishing that long-winded tome with a neatly punctuating quote and getting all hyped up to smash that send button, I saw that Casey Newton of the excellent Platformer has just announced he’s moving the entire newsletter away from Substack to a similar platform called Ghost. Platformer has spent the past few weeks embroiled in one of those internet Nazi platforming sagas, after a piece in The Atlantic late last year found that the site is a comfortable home for a collection of white supremacist and anti-semitic newsletters.

The implications of this, especially as Newton interprets them, are intriguing and relevant to the discussion we’ve just been having (is it really a discussion if it’s just me talking? no) and pertain particularly well to defining an approach to free speech that makes sense for online spaces.

I’ll try to summarise the situation as briefly as possible: Substack aimed to be hands-off and avoid censoring the content they host, before backing down and banning some of the newsletters. While it sounds sketchy, this isn’t an unusual approach for hosting providers, who – being essentially website landlords – don’t want to become locked in the messy, expensive and unavoidably subjective process of moderating what their tenants say and do unless the content is explicitly illegal (and therefore actionable, at their liability).

The problem is that Substack is no longer simply a web hosting provider. Casey himself notes that Ghost, the service that Platformer is moving to, is almost definitely used to publish similarly offensive content to Substack. The crucial difference is that unlike Ghost, Substack recently underwent a transition in scope, building in engagement-driving social-media-like features like algorithmic recommendations, social feeds, and user interaction. As such, Substack stopped dealing simply with hosting content, and now creates and alters the contexts of that content. When Substack recommends that you follow a Nazi newsletter they obviously become an active advocate for the content of that newsletter, but further: they create new contexts for it; suggesting perhaps that lots of other people follow this newsletter or maybe the content of this newsletter is not objectionable.

To drag us back to that coffee shop analogy: Kanye West is in there talking to David Duke, which is bad enough but now the owner’s just put a new sign up renaming the place to The Cool Guys Having Good Ideas CafĂ©. Anyway while I’ve been writing this, it looks like Paris Marx has also just moved Disconnect to Ghost. I hope your Friday night is as exciting as mine is!