Workin’ for the Weekend #75: Sayonara, Deplatformers!

Also: EARLY Second Sunday tomorrow, like 11 am ET!

Hi gang, from the lovely confines of my home set-up, which beginning sooner than is comfortable will include YouTube video for The Reason Roundtable podcast. It will likely NOT be the vantage point from which paying customers will be seeing me tomorrow for our monthly Second Sunday Zoomcast with our paying subscribers, because the whole gang’s in NYC this weekend to record both that and a regular episode w/ a beloved guest tonight. BUT HERE’S THE THING: Tomorrow’s Second Sunday podcast will be EARLY, like rough-draft 11 am ET. That means all you Euro-Middle Easterners will be in the catbird seat. So come on out!

* When last we let ourselves look upon the dumb pressure campaign on Substack to censor alleged if hard-to-find Nazis, Episode #369 veteran Hamish McKenzie had responded Dec. 21 that “we don't think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem [of people holding/expressing extreme views] go away—in fact, it makes it worse,” and that seemed to be that. Alas.

On Jan. 4, Casey Newton, publisher of the popular and tellingly named tech newsletter Platformer, wrote a piece titled “Why Substack Is at a Crossroads,” in which he bragged about tattling….

Over the past few days, the Platformer team analyzed dozens of Substacks for pro-Nazi content. Earlier this week, I met with Substack to press my case that they should remove content that praises Nazis from the network. Late today, we submitted a list of accounts that we believe to be in violation of the company’s existing policies against incitement to violence. I am scheduled to meet with the company again tomorrow.

…. and then on Jan. 8 the (de)Platformer in Chief bragged about getting his scalps: “[T]he company is…terminating the accounts of several publications that endorse Nazi ideology and that Platformer flagged to the company for review last week.” McKenzie said the policy had not changed, but rather that the offending sites were found in violation of existing rules. Yet Newton was still unsure whether this unenumerated level of censoriousness was enough to keep him around at the (Nazi) bar.

That’s when our pal Jesse Singal (#111, #171) decided to look a little closer. And behold!

[R]eaders of Platformer were denied a couple of key pieces of information: first, Platformer, after what Newton described as a fairly comprehensive search involving the evaluation of dozens of Substack newsletters, could find only six publications it deemed worthy of reporting to Substack, and second, Substack was not making a dime from those publications. Both these facts run counter to the idea that Substack has a serious Nazi problem.

Jesse then (as he is wont to do) followed up with several emailed questions to Newton, Substack, and original “Substack Has a Nazi Problem” author Jonathan Katz, and, well, the (first half of the) conclusion of those efforts are reflected in his headline: “Platformer’s Reporting On Substack’s Supposed ‘Nazi Problem’ Is Shoddy And Misleading.”

We are of course not done.

On Jan. 10 came the inevitable Taylor Lorenz co-byline in the Washington Post, filled with bless-their-hearts quotes from a series of anguished media/tech writers:

“It’s honestly insulting, both to writers and readers on the platform, that they think they can shut up those of us who have serious concerns with such a meager gesture,” said [Molly] White, a software engineer and cryptocurrency critic who left Substack this month to self-host her newsletter.

Others worried that the damage to the site’s image has been done.

“I don’t want to meet my dad’s friends and I say I write on Substack and they go, ‘Oh, that’s the racist site, right?’” said Ryan Ozawa, who runs a Substack newsletter called Hawaii Bulletin dedicated to start-ups and innovation in Hawaii. […]

“This was so avoidable, and that’s what frustrates me about it,” said Parker Molloy, author of the Present Age, a newsletter about media, culture and politics. “They could have put out a simple, ‘We’ll look into this and any post that violates our policies will be removed.’ But instead what they put out felt deliberately provocative.” […]

[It’s] “little more than a PR move to try to put this controversy behind them, not a real effort to address their content moderation problem,” said Paris Marx, author of the tech criticism newsletter Disconnect.

Walker Bragman, who publishes a journalism newsletter called Important Context, said he was glad to hear about the company’s decision Monday. But he found it too little, too late to change his mind. “It's the smallest, most basic step the platform needs to take,” he said. “There's still a ton of disinformation.”

Then, in the least surprising I-break-with-thee note since the days of Billy Martin and George Steinbrenner, Casey Newton announced “Why Platformer Is Leaving Substack.” Which was followed by the equally unsurprising Taylor Lorenz co-post-write, which included such factual assertions as “Substack’s woes deepen,” and “Substack has been reeling from writer discontent,” and “recently, the platform has been at a crossroads.” (I mean, maybe these are all true, but also maybe they are not?) This was my favorite bit from the WaPo:

Newton said that before pulling his outlet from the platform he sought input from his readers, some of whom work in content moderation and trust and safety for major tech companies. He said the overwhelming response was that they preferred to support Platformer elsewhere.

Emphasis mine, to highlight an entire category of journalo whose antitheticalness (totally a word) to l’esprit de free speech has been one of the single worst and most self-destructive tendencies in my chosen trade. If you would have told me back in 1986, when I first started typing articles, that there would totally be a category within the profession fairly characterizable as Journalists for Censorship, I would have sent Mojo Nixon over to knock some sense in you. Bad for speech, bad for political discourse, bad for journalism.

Speaking of which! Like a Gila Monster clamping down on a forearm, Jesse Singal was back Jan. 12 with a looooooooooong piece titled “There Are Major Factual Issues With Jonathan M. Katz’s ‘Atlantic’ Article, ‘Substack Has A Nazi Problem.’” Excerpt:

Some very simple googling solved the mystery and proved that basically every element of Katz’s story about Patrick Casey is false. In just two paragraphs, Katz falsely accuses Substack of tolerating the violation of its policies on the part of a white supremacist, falsely claims Casey was able to make a comfortable living on Substack, falsely (and strongly) implies that Casey set up a paywall on Substack when he should have been banned from doing so, and falsely portrays Casey’s “The cause isn’t going anywhere” quote as though it has anything to do with Substack, which it didn’t.

Jesse later luxuriates in the (quite censorious and sure-to-be-arbitrary) guidelines of the various platforms that the deplatformers are decamping to. About which, I’ll give the last word to at least this section of a vituperative essay by Freddie deBoer:

I am waiting for someone to make a minimally-compelling argument for why using Substack is worse than using Wordpress, or DNS routing, or the TCP/IP protocol. Sterns links to Newton and [Ryan] Broderick’s peacocking farewells, but they provide no clarity either. And I have to be the one to point out that none of them, not Katz or Stern or Broderick or Newton or any of the many people who have contributed to this grubby little genre, have ever been able to articulate the core moral superiority of their future platforms that house far-right extremists compared to that of the one they’re so proud to leave.

* Onward! Our gal Nancy Rommelmann (#79, Special Dispatch #27, S.D. #30, #198, #203, S.D. #34, S.D. #50, S.D. #64, S.D. #111) is heading out to do some journalistic work for you: “I’ll be in Israel for two weeks starting this Monday, writing for Reason as well for this site. I will be reporting from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the West Bank and among the Druze in Daliat el Carmel; from where the October 7 slaughter occurred (but likely not Gaza; kids’ orders) and picking up stories on the fly. I am super-lucky in that a fan (I have them!) bought my ticket; the rest is on me. My paid subscribers make this possible. If you want the full fig and cannot afford it, drop me a line and I’ll get you on a list. The rest of you, you know what to do.” To be clear, what to do is mash that paid-subscription button.

* Speaking of Israel, Mike Pesca (#343, #418) went this week on the Ask a Jew podcast, to discuss “the war with Hamas, growing up Italian and Jewish, and attempt to answer some of the nation’s most divisive questions like — does ketchup belong on a bagel? Should the voting age be raised to 45? And what kind of Jews wear hats?”

* Speaking of Jews, Eli Lake (#52, #65, #141, #174, S.D. #51, #326, #368, #407, Members Only #184) has a piece this week for The Free Press headlined, “What Actually Happened Underneath the Chabad-Lubavitch Headquarters? Why (almost) everything you think you know about the Brooklyn synagogue tunnels is wrong.”

* Upcoming events: Jan. 22 Reason Speakeasy with Nick Gillespie (S.D. #72, #379) interviewing David Stockman about his book  Trump’s War on Capitalism; plus Jan. 29 SoHo Forum debate with Tony Mills and Terence Kealey arguing over the sentence, “Government must play a role in fostering scientific and technological progress by funding basic research.”

* Comment of the Week, of STRONG interest to my 8-year-old, comes from Randolph Carter:

Studio Ghibli (come on guys) fun fact: a large group of the staff at Ghibli originally worked for a studio called Topcraft, and they were the team that animated a bunch of Rankin/Bass projects in the 70s and 80s, including the cartoon adaptations of The Hobbit and Return of The King. If you watch The Hobbit cartoon with that knowledge in your head, suddenly it looks like an anime with amazing watercolor backgrounds.

Fuck it, walkoff music is the aforementioned Mojo, in a track I think Ken Layne sang backup on: