Substack promotes a Nazi
The company has long wanted to be seen as neutral infrastructure — this week, we saw why that’s a fantasy
This week, Substack apologized after sending a push alert promoting one of the pro-Nazi blogs on its network. Today, let’s talk about what it reveals about the gap between the company’s rhetoric around free expression and the reality of its approach.
Taylor Lorenz had the story in User Mag:
Substack sent a push alert encouraging users to subscribe to a Nazi newsletter that claimed Jewish people are a sickness and that we must eradicate minorities to build a “White homeland.”
NatSocToday describes itself as “a weekly newsletter featuring opinions and news important to the National Socialist and White Nationalist Community.”
The push alert was sent to an undisclosed number of users’ phones on Monday. Some people posted about the app alert on social media, confused why they were being prompted to subscribe to a Nazi blog.
Moreover, anyone who clicked on the newsletter's profile saw recommendations for other white nationalist publications on the network.
Substack said the alert was an accident. “We discovered an error that caused some people to receive push notifications they should never have received,” the company told Lorenz. “In some cases, these notifications were extremely offensive or disturbing. This was a serious error, and we apologize for the distress it caused. We have taken the relevant system offline, diagnosed the issue, and are making changes to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
This story piqued my interest in part because Platformer left Substack last year over the company’s decision not to remove or even demonetize pro-Nazi publications. (And when I say Nazi, I’m talking about literal 1930s German Nazis.) At the time, some critics accused us of overreacting. Some said we hadn’t found enough Nazi publications to justify leaving. Others said it was a stunt to boost paid subscriptions. Glenn Greenwald said it was part of a pro-censorship crusade on the part of liberal media. “The great cause of this species of liberal journalists is not confronting power centers or exposing deceit and crimes,” he wrote, “but whining and agitating that social media platforms must censor more.”
In truth, we had more than one reason to leave. But foremost among them was the certainty that Substack’s Nazi problem would only get worse with time. Once it announced that right-wing extremists were free to set up shop on its network and start selling subscriptions, their arrival was a certainty. And because the platform invests heavily in social media-style growth hacks, it was inevitable that Substack would actively promote Nazi blogs across various surfaces. People would download the Substack app to read Platformer; they would enable push notifications to be informed of new editions; and then sometime after that there would be a push featuring a publication with a swastika logo.
Well, here we are. The inevitable happened.
Given how likely all this was, I don’t have much to add about the push notification itself. I did, however, find the company’s statement about it curious.
