With Revenues Declining, Corporate Media Demand Substack Censorship

Claims of rampant Nazism on social media continue to fall apart

This story initially wrote that Katz did not reply to a request for comment, but Katz did reply. His reply was caught in our spam filter. We have updated the story with a quote from Katz, below. — ZJ & AG

As Public reported earlier this month, the censorship campaign against Substack is largely based on exaggerations and half-truths. Critics claim that Substack has a “neo-Nazi problem,” but the reality is that there are few neo-Nazi newsletters on the platform, and they have a tiny number of readers and subscribers. If anything, Substack’s policy on free expression seems to be successful in marginalizing extreme voices, who are much less popular than more mainstream ideas on the platform.

But new details uncovered by journalist Jesse Singal suggest that the Atlantic article by Jonathan Katz that started the latest anti-Substack campaign was even more flawed than we realized.

Singal caught factual errors in Katz’s article. First, Katz claimed that anyone who is “restricted from making money on Substack” is banned from the platform.

Singal confirmed with Substack that the policy is that if you’re banned by Stripe – which is used to pay writers via Substack – then you can’t monetize your content on the platform.

This is important because of a claim that Katz makes later on in the piece, that white nationalist Patrick Casey is making a comfortable income from Substack.

Singal revealed that what Katz did was selectively quote Casey’s words to make it appear that he has a large revenue stream from Substack. He located the blog post where Casey described his income.

In one paragraph, Casey writes, “aside from the unfortunate realities of deplatforming, my life is going fairly well. I’ve been blessed with a growing network of friends and political contacts, I’m in great health, and I’m able to live comfortably doing something I find enjoyable and fulfilling.”

It’s easy to think he might be talking about Substack in that paragraph. But then in the next paragraph, Casey explains that he’s “been banned from Stripe, which Substack uses for its paid subscriptions.” He instead pointed readers to another service, called SubscribeStar, to financially support him.

Singal confirmed with Casey that since then, he’s been unbanned by Stripe, but Casey told Singal that he “doesn’t have many” paid subscribers through Substack itself. Singal’s revelations led the Atlantic to edit Katz’s article to state that the extent to which Substack helps Casey fund his livelihood “is unclear,” but it did not include Casey’s remarks estimating that he doesn’t make much money from Substack.

Reached for comment, Katz told Public, “Jesse’s post provided further evidence for what I reported, and Substack has confirmed: that Substack allows Nazis and white nationalists to distribute and monetize their newsletters. It also contradicted your previous erroneous reporting that the problem is limited to a handful of publications. I don’t think the important question here is exactly how much money individual Nazis are making on Substack; the important fact is that they benefit from the Substack network at all. But you also might note that in the Atlantic article, I named two of the several white-supremacist newsletters with Substack Bestseller badges, both of which you and Jesse have ignored.”

Katz’s article and the larger anti-Substack campaign prompted Casey Newton, who runs Platformer, to recently quit the site and move his publication to the competing newsletter service Ghost.

In explaining the move, Newton wrote that “Ghost founder and CEO John O’Nolan committed to us that Ghost’s hosted service will remove pro-Nazi content, full stop. If nothing else, that’s further than Substack will go, and makes Ghost a better intermediate home for Platformer than our current one.”

The key words here are “hosted service” – this refers to only a portion of Ghost’s content. Ghost’s page on content moderation includes the following paragraph:

Ghost is a freely-released open source publishing platform which anyone can download and use to share their opinions, ideas or viewpoints without intervention, on their own website. Our technology is decentralised, independent software which does not promote, expose or assist any particular content — nor do we have any control or ability to censor, or moderate what is published. The majority of Ghost websites in the world are not hosted by us.

That means that most of what is used by Ghost is completely unmoderated. Newton is protesting what he sees as insufficient censorship on Substack by going to a platform where most of the content is even less censored. Hosted websites, as noted by Newton, are subject to certain rules, including prohibitions on incitement to violence. But Substack itself removed 5 of the neo-Nazi blogs for incitement – rules that it applies to all content on Substack rather than just a few hosted sites like Ghost. Therefore, the case for moving from Substack to Ghost because you want to see stronger moderation of what’s being said is actually very weak.

Newton did not respond to a request for comment from Public.

Although Casey and Katz are independent, their criticisms of Substack have been massively amplified by the mainstream media (see above for a sampling of recent headlines). What is driving the attack on Substack?

Media Wars

Many major media outlets have covered the pressure on Substack to censor Nazi content, as well as Substack’s eventual loss of Platformer. The saga was featured in Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, NBC News, the Guardian, the New York Times, and others.

On the New York Times’ “Hard Fork” podcast, Newton discussed Public’s reporting with technology columnist Kevin Roose. A Substack spokesperson told Public that the list of Nazi Substacks Newton had reported to the company consisted of only 6 Substacks with 29 paid subscribers between them. This list, Newton insisted on “Hard Fork,” was not actually definitive, but just intended to represent “the very worst stuff” he could find. His earlier representation of the analysis, though, was that the Platformer team had “analyzed dozens of Substacks for pro-Nazi content,” suggesting that their search was thorough and that an entire team had combed through many Substacks to find Nazi content.

On the podcast, Roose and Newton framed leaving Substack as a noble moral act against Nazism. “I’m really proud of you for making this stand,” Roose told Newton.

This seemingly coordinated attack on Substack, and suggestion from many publications that the only moral course of action is to renounce the platform, has a clear goal. Falsely painting alternative media as Nazi-aligned is anticompetitive behavior aimed at reducing the threat Substack poses to the legacy media.

This is not the first time that a social media company has found itself under pressure to censor more. The Facebook Files showed that media pressure was a large part of the company’s decision to remove more content, including true content that could lead to “vaccine hesitancy.” Internally, Facebook had determined that such censorship would backfire. Yet negative media coverage helped push the company to enforce stricter policies.

"We are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the White House and the press, to remove more COVID-19 vaccine-discouraging content,” Facebook’s Director of Strategic Response, Rosa Birch, wrote in an April 2021 email to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg.

The Facebook Files revealed additional details about the media’s role in pushing for censorship. In July 2021, Andy Slavitt, Senior Advisor to the White House Covid-19 pandemic response team, sent Facebook a tweet from NBC “disinformation reporter” Ben Collins in order to demand greater censorship. The same month, the New York Times’ Sheera Frenkel published an article about Dr. Joseph Mercola and his use of Facebook to spread mis- and disinformation. Facebook responded to the story by looking for ways to “blackhole” Mercola, a radical measure that would remove all links to Mercola’s content from the platform. In reaction to Frenkel’s article, Facebook employees actively searched for an excuse to punish Mercola and considered blackholing him based on posts from months earlier.

Corporate media journalists also pressured Twitter to silence and deplatform their independent competitors. Journalists from CNN and Axios urged Twitter to suspend Alex Berenson for questioning Covid-19 vaccine safety and efficacy. In March 2021 when Axios reporter Ashley Gold emailed Twitter about Berenson’s content, Axios was receiving advertising money from Pfizer and promoted the company on its website.

Since the strategy of demanding “content moderation” to undercut independent journalists on Twitter and Facebook proved, at least temporarily, effective, it’s no wonder some mainstream figures and their allies are trying to use the same strategy again on Substack.

The effort to denigrate alternative media is also supported by organizations like NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index, which, as a recently filed lawsuit has alleged, blacklist political dissent. Newton’s Platformer is one of the few Substacks NewsGuard has rated, giving it a 92.5/100. NewsGuard lists Platformer as one of its “Unsung Heroes,” websites and podcasts with high “Trust Scores” that “receive little notice, despite producing impactful, fact-based news and analysis.”

NewsGuard appears to have gone out of its way to rate and promote Newton’s pro-censorship Platformer. Notably, investigative Journalist Lee Fang reported last year that NewsGuard works closely with the Defense Department and with the intelligence sector.

In response to our inquiry, NewsGuard co-CEO Gordon Crovitz told Public, “We have rated a handful of Substacks as we get requests, but don't yet have a policy to rate these in the quantity we do for websites and some other media. As Substack grows in significance, I imagine we'll continue to rate more Substacks.”

Stand Up For Free Speech

The good news is that the public’s trust in the mainstream media has fallen dramatically. A recent Gallup poll found that only 32% of Americans trust the mass media “a great deal” or “a fair amount.” A record 39% of Americans said their amount of trust in mass media was “none at all.” The average monthly number of unique visitors to the top 50 newspapers in the US declined 20% in the fourth quarter of 2022 compared to 2021. Major outlets are seeing their digital audience sharply declining, are losing advertising revenue, and are laying off staff.