Substack Is Still Happy to Host and Recommend Nazi Publications ⇥ theguardian.com

Geraldine McKelvie, the Guardian:

The global publishing platform Substack is generating revenue from newsletters that promote virulent Nazi ideology, white supremacy and antisemitism, a Guardian investigation has found.

I appreciate the intent of yet another article drawing attention to Substack’s willingness to host straightforward no-ambiguity Nazi publications, but I wish McKelvie and the Guardian would have given more credit to all the similar reporting that came before them. For example:

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.

This is the very same account which, according to reporting by Taylor Lorenz last year, was promoted in a push notification from Substack. Substack told Lorenz the notification was “a serious error”. In the same article, Lorenz drew attention to NatSocToday’s recommendation of another explicitly Nazi publication hosted on Substack called the White Rabbit. This, too, is included as an example in McKelvie’s more recent report. Lorenz’s prior reporting goes unmentioned.

However, because both stories have contemporary screenshots of each Nazi publication’s profile, we can learn something — and this is another reason why I wish Lorenz’s story was cited. NatSocToday’s 2,800 subscribers as of this week does not sound like very much, but when Lorenz published her article at the end of July, it had only 746 subscribers. It has grown by over 2,000 subscribers in just six months. The same appears true of the White Rabbit, which went from “8.6K+” subscribers to “10K+” in the same timeframe.

One thing McKelvie gets wrong is suggesting “subscribers” equates to “paying members”. Scrolling through the subscriber lists of both of the publications above shows a mix of paid and free members. This is supported by Substack’s documentation, which I wish I had thought of checking before visiting either hateful newsletter. That is, while Substack is surely making some money by mainstreaming and recommending the kind of garbage people used to have to deliberately try and find, it is not a ten percent cut of the annual rate multiplied by the subscriber count.

By the way, while I am throwing some stones here, I should point out that Lorenz herself launched her User Magazine newsletter about a year after Jonathan M. Katz’s article “Substack Has a Nazi Problem”. Based on its archive, Lorenz just repurposed her personal Substack newsletter and existing audience to create User Mag. But Substack’s whole premise is that you own your email list and can bring it elsewhere, so Lorenz could have chosen any platform. Substack was never just infrastructure — it is a social media website with longform posts as its substance, and indifferent moderation as a feature.