Tech News Site Platformer Quits Substack Over Pro-Nazi Content

January 11, 2024 @ 8:16 PM

The influential tech news blog Platformer is leaving Substack, a move founder Casey Newton says is due to the company’s resistance to meaningfully moderate pro-Nazi speech.

Newton, who launched Platformer on Substack in 2020, said Platformer will be move to Ghost, an open source publisher similar to the for-profit Substack, a transition expected to finish by Tuesday.

In a lengthy statement included in Platformer’s Thursday newsletter, Newton touted the way publishing on Substack helped him grow Platformer robustly since it launched in 2020. But, he said, “if Substack can grow a publication like ours that quickly, it can grow other kinds of publications, too.”

“Until Substack makes it clear that it will take proactive steps to remove hate speech and extremism, the current size of the problem isn’t relevant. The company’s edgelord branding ensures that the fringes will continue to arrive and set up shop, and its infrastructure creates the possibility that those publications will grow quickly. That’s what matters,” Newton also said.

The announcement comes one day after the company banned 5 pro-Nazi accounts, an attempt to mitigate growing uproar among contributors sparked by a November article in The Atlantic that revealed Substack hosts — and profits — from numerous accounts promoting pro-Nazi and other openly white supremacist ideologies.

A group of contributors billing themselves as Substackers Against Nazis published an open letter in December calling on the company to do more about the problem and to explain why it hadn’t so far.

Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie responded on Dec. 21 with a letter explaining why the company is reluctant to go after such content.

“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,” McKenzie wrote in part.