People on my Bluesky feed are pretty worked up about substack, which won’t ban Nazis, does ban porn, and is twisting itself into a pretzel reasoning why.
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Twitter is a very good argument that you could replace the word “pornography” with “Nazism” in that last screenshot and it would still be correct (minus the sentence about OF, but who knows, it might be correct there, too)
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Gonna need a cite on how banning Nazis makes it worse
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Lmao that is idiotic logic they’re using
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We’re cool with Nazis but fuck you specifically, Ilsa.
It’s helpful in navigating this space to think of all techbros as basically being Mason Malmuth.
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Why doesn’t Substack allow porn? Seems like a crazy business decision. Are the owners TradCath anti-porn weirdos? His explanation is literally “man, if we let porn on the site we’d be flooded with new business.”
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Ridiculous hair splitting and absurd projection
Its quite literally speech and has been ruled by the fucking supreme court as such. Holy shit
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Most non porn sites don’t want to share with porn sites.
But most non-porn sites want to be family friendly. What’s the point of being precious about porn when you’re already letting Nazis publish their newsletters on your website?
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It’s possible that becoming a platform for pornography loses access to financial services, so it might actually be a non-crazy business decision. I think I’ve read stories of banks shunning porn-related businesses.
The Founders appear to have been born in Canada, New Zealand, and Japan.
Substack is not the government and aren’t bound to use the government definition of free speech.
It might not be a crazy long-term business decision even if it’s not related to financial services. I wonder how much worse for them this would be going if they said “allowing pornography would hurt our business, allowing Nazi content doesn’t”, which is obviously why they’re doing what they’re doing.
Banning porn on a platform is obviously totally fine. I agree with that Hamish guy that it’s a category error to be like “you ban porn, therefore that means you should censor objectionable views”. That argument makes no sense. The correct argument is “you should ban Nazis because they’re Nazis”.
I think where you draw the line on objectionable content is a tough question, but it doesn’t seem like Substacks that describe themselves as “National Socialist” and feature swastikas is a lineball call.
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It’s more like “You ban porn, so obviously you are making decisions about what’s OK with you and what isn’t, so make the decision that Nazis are not OK.” And Substack is like “oh, that’s not speech tho”.
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Exactly. If you’re not allowing everything then you are at some point calling strikes and balls and then it’s fair game to ask where the strike zone is drawn and why. You guys are all Americans so obv my baseball analogy is very clear to all.
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It’s not really hard to see that some people want to interpret freedom of speech as freedom of political (and maybe religious) speech and exclude other forms of speech from absolute protection.
As either you or someone else pointed out, they’re not the government. So they can use whatever criteria they want, but they’re restricting some speech and allowing others. It’s 100% up to them how they pick and choose.