Censors Are Trying to Trick You Into Thinking Substack Has a "Nazi Problem"

“Weimar Fallacy” shows that such efforts can backfire

Mel Brooks’ “The Producers”

America’s censors have worked their way through complaining about virtually every last pocket of free speech left and are now returning to an old foe: Substack, the newsletter platform this publication is published on.

The latest complaint began with a piece in The Atlantic by the journalist Jonathan Katz, who laments that Substack has “become a home and propagator of white supremacy and anti-Semitism.”

Katz’s piece was then elevated by other publications, like The New York Times, that warned that The Atlantic “found that at least 16 Substack newsletters had ‘overt Nazi symbols’ in their logos or graphics, and that white supremacists had been allowed to publish on, and profit from, the platform.” 

A piece in Business Insider speculated that the reason Substack allows far-right content to percolate on its site is because it’s profitable for them: “Substack is likely making money from these Nazi blogs, some of which are monetized and have paying subscribers, of which Substack takes a 10% cut.”

Eventually, some Substack users wrote an open letter to the owners of the platform all but threatening to leave if they continued to allow white supremacist writers on the service. As of this writing, around 200 Substackers had signed onto the letter. 

Earlier this week, Platformer’s Casey Newton lamented that on “Substack…extremists can post for money.” Newton had met with Substack to press his case that neo-Nazi content should be removed from the service, and he has effectively been running a campaign to get Substack to start removing offensive material from its site.

As part of that campaign, he announced that he had sent a list of Substacks to the service’s owners that he believes violates the company’s policies against incitement to violence.

A Substack spokesperson told Public that Newton’s list contains just 6 Substacks with 29 paid subscribers between them, a tiny fraction of the more than 2 million paid subscribers the service has today.

The spokesperson added that Substack will be reviewing whether these 6 publications violate the platform’s pre-existing policy against incitement to violence.

Given the tone of the protestations from Newton, Katz, and others you’d think that Substack was aflow in neo-Nazi content – everywhere you turn, you find yourself face to face with a well-read, highly-regarded bonafide white supremacist publication.

But a closer look at Katz’s article – the missive that started this all – reveals how little reach these substacks have in the first place.

One Substack he cites that contains an anti-Jewish rant about vaccines had no likes or shares and just one comment on it during the entire month of December – and that comment was left by the author himself, who decided to add an addendum to his post.

Others have found a bit more traction – but not much. Patrick Casey, who was previously a leader in the American white nationalist Identity Evropa movement, runs a Substack page cited by Katz that gets a tiny amount of engagement from readers. His most popular post of all time, as ranked by the number of likes, has only 10 likes and no comments. 

To give you a basis for comparison, a post on the cooking Substack Kitchen Projects that instructs readers how to make an excellent yule log has 119 likes and 25 comments.

Talia Lavin, the former New Yorker fact-checker who resigned after falsely accusing an ICE agent of having a Nazi tattoo, went as far as to leave Substack for another service called Buttondown. She wrote on that platform that she “left Substack behind, after its founders stated, in no uncertain terms, that they're not just OK with, but in principle supportive of, having loads of out-and-out Nazis on their platform.” 

Yet Lavin and many of the writers threatening to leave Substack use X, which has plenty of extremist users, from white supremacists to Hindu nationalists to avowed Stalinists. Why threaten Substack but use other platforms with inarguably a larger number of extreme users? 

After all, all Katz could produce were 16 Substacks that feature neo-Nazi symbols in their branding, out of the thousands of Substacks that are available for subscribers to browse through.

Unlike X, Facebook, or other social media platforms where users are constantly interacting with people they don’t know, Substack allows people to opt-in to the content they choose to consume. Nobody is forced to read any Substack they may view as extreme or offensive. 

And there’s little evidence that they’re choosing to consume the neo-Nazi content to begin with. 

Substack does not force creators to release how many subscribers they have or how much money they make on the platform; for that reason, they can’t force the extreme Substacks to release these numbers. But the platform’s leaderboard, where you can see the most popular Substacks, gives you a sense of where the readerbase is focused.

In the U.S. politics category, where the neo-Nazi substacks would be categorized, the most popular Substack is authored by Heather Richardson, a left-of-center historian who writes about American politics within the framework of history.

Richardson’s post on January 1st of this year, which dives into Civil War history, has over 3,200 likes and 435 comments. Compare that to The Tribalist, a white nationalist Substack that Katz complains interviewed former skinhead Billy Roper. The substack has all of 3 posts, with 4 likes and 1 comment among them. 

These Substacks aren’t just fringe next to Richardson’s, which is among the most popular on the service. If you go to #205 on the Substack U.S. Politics leaderboard, you’ll find Santa Barbara Current, which bills itself as exploring “the cultural, economic, and political currents that impact our lives on Santa Barbara's central coast.” It has over 5,000 subscribers and its top post has 15 likes and 18 comments. A lot more people seem to want to read about sailing or knitting than want to be recruited into a white supremacist movement. 

To say that Substack has a “Nazi problem” because of a handful of pages almost nobody reads – and the platform almost certainly barely makes any money off of – exist on the platform would be kind of like saying the 1st Amendment has a “Nazi problem” because there are a handful of white nationalists and neo-Nazis in America who have their rights to speech and assembly protected as well. 

Do American libraries have a Nazism problem because you can check out a copy of Mein Kampf – or a Communism problem because you can obtain a copy of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book? 

Just as Substack refuses to engage in political censorship, the First Amendment disallows the government from censoring any point of view, even unpopular or extreme ones. And in both cases, the more extreme speech has been successfully marginalized by the less extreme speech. Substack pages run by Jewish and gay Americans – groups loathed by white nationalists and neo-Nazis – are among the platform’s most popular destinations.

Substack’s model proves that the marketplace of ideas is succeeding, not failing, to defeat extreme speech by allowing everyone to speak rather than shutting people up. 

In fact, the alternative often ends up backfiring.

Hate speech laws didn’t stop the original Nazis

Taiki Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit (2019)

Much of the desire to censor extremist content on Substack comes from an erroneous belief that censorship eliminates unsavory views from society. If we could only silence Nazis, Katz and others think, no one would develop hateful beliefs. 

But in a video recently produced by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), legal scholar Nadine Strossen argues that this is incorrect. It is a popular theory that if the Nazi Party in Germany had been censored, the Holocaust would never have happened. Yet some experts, Strossen says, “refer to that theory as the ‘Weimar fallacy,’” because “it is in fact not true that there was free speech for hate speech, including Nazi speech, during the Weimar Republic.”

Strossen, who was president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) from 1991 to 2008, explains that Germany had multiple laws restricting speech during Germany’s Weimar period from 1918 to 1933, which preceded Adolf Hitler’s consolidation of power. 

Greg Lukianoff, president of FIRE, and Strossen, have carefully detailed how censorship backfired in Germany and actually helped strengthen the Nazi Party. Weimar laws banned hateful speech and particularly hateful speech directed at Jews. An organization similar to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in the United States, Strossen says, also “had offices all over Germany and made sure that all of these laws regularly were enforced through both criminal prosecution and civil lawsuits.”

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Party’s chief propagandist, Theodor Fritsch, an antisemitic publisher and journalist, and Julius Streicher, a Nazi member of the Reichstag, were sentenced to prison time for violating these speech laws. The Weimar Republic also shut down hundreds of Nazi newspapers and suppressed antisemitic pamphlets. Hitler was even prohibited from public speaking in several German states for two years. 

Yet none of this worked. “To the contrary,” explains Strossen, “the Nazis themselves, as well as many historians, believe that the net impact of those laws censoring Nazi speech was to amplify their message. To give them attention that they otherwise would never have received and to gain sympathy that they otherwise would never have received.”

Far from preventing the rise of Nazism, censorship fueled Nazi sentiment by providing Hitler and others with an opportunity to present themselves as martyrs sharing valuable truths. In her book, HATE: Why We Should Resist it With Free Speech, Not Censorship, Strossen expands on this idea.

“Censoring any material increases an audience’s desire to obtain it and disposes the audience to be more receptive to it,” Strossen writes. “This phenomenon is so prevalent that several widely used terms have been coined to describe it, including the ‘boomerang effect,’ the ‘forbidden fruits effect,’ and the ‘Streisand effect.’” Censorship creates martyrs because it “ousts critics from the moral high ground” and allows censored individuals to claim a position of victimhood and moral authority. 

The people clamoring for Substack to restrict Nazi speech, which currently has barely any audience, appear to be unaware of this history, and they may not care. Their view that hate speech should simply be eliminated is not based on a rational assessment of empirical evidence or the historical record, but on a knee-jerk inability to cope with things they dislike. 

One need only look at Germany today to realize how unwise this approach is. Germany has some of the strictest hate speech restrictions in the world, yet antisemitism appears to be continuously increasing, according to the German government and German civil society groups. In France, hate speech laws have also failed to prevent hate and Holocaust denial, which French president Emmanual Macron claimed was on the rise last year.  

All this strongly suggests that those calling for more censorship of hate speech are asking Substack to take impractical and counterproductive actions. They prefer to make themselves feel good in the short-term by erasing offensive ideas, rather than consider the long-term consequences of turning these ideas into “forbidden fruit.” These are not adult voices of reason, but are impulsive advocates for measures that would actually make the problem worse. 

Substack shows how to deal with censors 

Unlike many other institutions that have buckled under the pressure to censor their users, Substack has decided to stand their ground.

“I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views. But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don't think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse,” said Substack head Hamish McKenzie in a December post. 

He went on to say that Substack is “committed to upholding and protecting freedom of expression, even when it hurts.”

Substack’s defiance should serve as a model to many other platforms that have caved to censorship demands. 

For years, Substack has come under attack for hosting dissident voices. In 2021, the platform faced criticism for hosting writers who were critical of transgender activist ideology.

But rather than cave to those critics, Substack refused to crack down. As a consequence, they weathered those criticisms without having to compromise on their principles. 

If Substack had decided to start removing the writers who were critical of aspects of gender ideology, where would they have stopped? They would have set a precedent that every time a critical mass of activists claim that content is offensive, they would be obligated to remove it. We’ve seen other platforms like Facebook and YouTube suffer this fate: they both started as relatively free speech environments, but as soon as they started censoring categories of political speech, they slid down a slippery slope to censoring even conjecture about a COVID-19 lab leak that may very well have been true.

It seems that many Substack writers agree with the company’s approach. A counterletter against censorship received far more signatures from writers than the letter calling for censorship

Despite the fact that calls to censor Substack are largely coming from the left, it’s important to remember that the left historically argued against such short-sighted censorship.

Noam Chomsky, famed linguist and lion of the left, once defended the right of a French Holocaust denier named Robert Faurisson to publish his work without being punished by the state. 

Writing in the progressive magazine The Nation, Chomsky made clear that he identified with none of Faurisson’s ideas. But he felt that he needed to defend his right to free speech, a concept the Nazis themselves strongly opposed.

“It seems to me something of a scandal that it is even necessary to debate these issues two centuries after Voltaire defended the right of free expression for views he detested,” he wrote. “It is a poor service to the memory of the victims of the holocaust to adopt a central doctrine of their murderers.”