What's the difference between a Nazi and a pornographer?
Substack would like you to believe that making judgments about content “for the sole purpose of sexual gratification,” or content promoting anorexia, is different than making judgment about Nazi content.
This seems…eminently reasonable. How did Ken White get to the point where he’s arguing that it’s not?
His piece has a good summary of that at the top (go read it!), but suffice to say:
There are Nazis publishing on Substack
Some people are mad about this (big surprise)
Substack didn’t do much about it (the surprises continue)
This led to a brouhaha in which many wrote that Substack should tighten their content moderation. In response, some wrote that Substack should maintain to it’s fairly laissez-faire philosophy, and finally Hamish weighed in with the authoritative judgement: Substack believes that censorship is bad, sunlight is the best disinfectant, and as a result, the Nazis would not be moderated away.
Which is how we get to Ken White’s response: Of course Substack believes in censorship is not always bad. After all, they ban calls to violence, doxxing, and pornography. Why is Nazi philosophy any different?
I don’t want to misrepresent Ken’s argument here. This whole porno thing is ancillary; his point is: this is a branding exercise for Substack. You could articulate it as:
Substack exists to make money
Having a strong brand is conducive to that
“Free speech” is a good brand; there’s a large, under-served audience that’s interested in it
This seems entirely correct. Even if Substack doesn’t exist to make money, it certainly needs to. And points 2 and 3 seem true (if you disagree, those points can be debated elsewhere).
But just because there’s one effective justification for Substack’s moderation policy doesn’t mean it’s the only one, or even the dominant one. Another justification is that content moderation is difficult, especially when it comes to deciding what content is beyond the pale. Ken is sympathetic to this,2 and I’m not actually sure how much Substack’s decision bothers him.
What bothers him is the rationale. It’s not one of those above two justifications, it’s a third one: Substack thinks they’re Doing the Right Thing™. In Hamish’s words:
…supporting individual rights and civil liberties while subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power. We are committed to upholding and protecting freedom of expression, even when it hurts.
So the question becomes: given all these justifications for doing the same thing, which one is correct?
If they all hold water…it’s hard to say, it could be any or all of them. But if you can show that one of the justifications doesn’t pencil out, your choice becomes a whole lot easier. That’s the argument Ken makes:
[I don’t] have to accept Substack’s attempt to convince me that its branding is about the good of humanity. It’s about money…
Substack is engaging in transparent puffery when it brands itself as permitting offensive speech because the best way to handle offensive speech is to put it all out there to discuss. It’s simply not true. Substack has made a series of value judgments about which speech to permit and which speech not to permit. Substack would like you to believe that making judgments about content “for the sole purpose of sexual gratification,” or content promoting anorexia, is different than making judgment about Nazi content. In fact, that’s not a neutral, value-free choice. It’s a valued judgment by a platform that brands itself as not making valued judgments. Substack has decided that Nazis are okay and porn and doxxing isn’t. The fact that Substack is engaging in a common form of free-speech puffery offered by platforms doesn’t make it true.
A bit more concisely: by banning pornography, Substack clearly doesn’t always “protect freedom of expression”. Shouldn’t this expose that justification as, uh, unjustified?
No, it shouldn’t.
Let’s look at a few excerpts from Hamish’s response (linked above):
I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views…
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…
There also remains a criticism that Substack is promoting these fringe voices…
These are all clearly focused on ideas. How people see the world, how they express those views, what concepts they’re thinking about. While the First Amendment’s “freedom of speech” is interpreted as a broad allowance in the Constitutional sense,3 Hamish’s interest seems a bit narrower.
When “Substack [decides] that Nazis are okay and porn and doxxing isn’t”, it seems to me like they’re making a judgement about what qualifies as an idea. Nazis promote ideas about how we should think about groups of people, ideas about how we should treat those groups, and ideas about what kinds of policies our government should adopt in service of their ideology. It’s an abhorrent ideology, which neither I, nor Hamish, nor Ken, nor (I hope) the vast majority of Substack’s readers buy, but it’s an ideology nonetheless. It’s a set of ideas.
Conversely…well, a picture of a naked lady4 just isn’t communicating the same kind of thing. It’s not that Substack is judging the Nazi’s idea as somehow more valuable than the pornographer’s. It’s that the pornographer is not communicating an idea at all. They’re trying to turn you on. If they were attempting to communicate something a bit more high-minded, that would probably be allowed by Substack guidelines, which make an exception for “depictions of nudity for artistic, journalistic, or related purposes, as well as erotic literature”.
Now, Substack proscribes more than just pornography. Their content guidelines also ban advertising, doxxing, credible threats of physical harm, and content that promotes harmful or illegal activities (including self-harm).
Advertising sounds similar to porn, to me — content that is not really “an idea”.5 Doxxing also fits pretty clearly into this category. Somebody’s address is not a thing to reason about, it will not influence your other thinking. It’s merely a piece of information, that can be used to harm somebody.
The ban on threats and promotion of illegal activity is a lot trickier, and it’s the strongest point of the argument — I’m surprised Ken gives it so little time. Substack is trying to define two categories of content: there is content that is about sharing ideas, and there is content that causes harm. The trouble is that these categories are not mutually-exclusive.
Sometimes content only fits one of these categories (like doxxing), and it’s an easy judgment call to make. But sometimes the content fits both, or exists on a continuum. There’s a fine line between an idea that would lead to threats or illegal activity, and actually promoting such. For instance, here is an idea that was quite popular a couple of years ago: “robbing supermarkets is ethical because the store is part of an oppressive, capitalist system”. I’m not sure when this idea becomes a threat to actual supermarkets, or promotion of burglary. A lot of Nazi rhetoric fits this shape.
I expect Substack to take a fairly narrow view of “incite violence” and “illegal activity”, and would allow “robbing supermarkets is ethical” while banning “go rob your local supermarket”. But I’m not sure.
My point here is not that Substack has made a crystal-clear distinction. My point is that they aren’t hypocritical. Identifying “ideas to discuss” and “harmful content” as two separate categories with two separate goals makes sense. Adding “porn” in to the mix is just as fair. Substack is identifying differences in kind, not degree.
Writing off the whole thing as puffery takes Substack’s arguments in bad faith. Now that’s Ken’s right, as it is yours. Substack has multiple reasons to have these content guidelines, and deciding which one they “really” believe is a decision between you and your god, I suppose.
But if you write off Substack’s high-minded principles as a smokescreen, you’re doing that based on what you project onto them, not what they’ve said. Their reasoning holds up.
While I disagree with this particular take of Ken White’s, I like him and have read his blog long before it moved to Substack (you should check it out). That’s part of the reason his post surprised me so much.
Full quote from Ken:
[Substack is] also not wrong to the extent they think that critics will never be satisfied and that getting into the business of moderating content is expensive and never-ending. It’s notable that the critics of Substack’s “Nazi problem” do not offer a specific definition of what content they’d moderate. It’s a know-it-if-you-see-it type of thing. Moreover, the critics of vigorous moderation are right about something — we are living in an area of near-constant demands to deplatform content. It’s easy to dismiss it as “oh that’s just people trying to protect vulnerable people from Nazis,” but that’s just not right. It’s often directed at less powerful people, and it’s often a tool of geopolitical disputes, as we see particularly powerfully since October 7. Demands come from humans and humans are frequently partisan, hypocritical assholes. It’s fair for Substack to complain that if they deplatform Nazis they’ll need to deal with a constant stream of other demands to deplatform content and be forced into the business of adjudicating speech about bitter disputes.
I am not a constitutional scholar, to say the least, so this is my layman’s interpretation. Perhaps the First Amendment is also largely concerned with ideas! In any case, right now I’m concerned with what Hamish means, not how that differs from the First Amendment.
This is a, uh, quaint idea of what porn is. But I don’t really feel like writing a more graphic example.
“X product is good” is, of course, an idea, and I don’t think Substack bans things like product reviews. I think the intent is important here. From the guidelines:
We don’t permit publications whose primary purpose is to advertise external products or services, drive traffic to third party sites, distribute offers and promotions, enhance search engine optimization, or similar activities.