Substackers Against Nazis

A collective letter to Substack leadership

I’m breaking from my newsletter’s normal focus to share an open letter to the leadership of Substack about its Nazi problem.

Early this year, a reader pledged to pay a subscription to my newsletter if I would authorize payments. I decided to do so, although I will never limit any of my content to paying subscribers. I am grateful to all those who have decided to support my work in this way. I have always intended this newsletter to be a place where I can work out my jumbled overabundance of thoughts about my adoption, and about adoption generally, and (I hope) thereby provide something of use or comfort to other adoptees who, like me, see something deeply morally rotten at the core of this practice everyone is conditioned to celebrate.

For me, the core of adoptee rights and justice is the right to oneself—to one’s identity. I construe this broadly enough to include one’s history: knowledge of one’s familial connections, original culture and community, and (literally life-or-death for many of us), health history. And in recent posts I have explored the connections between the struggle for adoptees’ identities and the struggles of marginalized groups including children and gender nonconforming people.

Therefore, like many other Substack writers, I am alarmed at the popularity of extreme right-wing content on this platform. (Richard Spencer is a Substacker.) I am dismayed at the fact that those of you who are paid subscribers are, in effect, subsidizing the efforts of those who use Substack to coordinate campaigns of hatred. I do not want to pull up stakes—at least, not quite yet. And so I am a signatory to an open letter to the leadership of Substack, demanding an answer to the question: Should Nazis have a home on Substack? If Substack employs any content moderation policies at all, how are they deployed against Nazis? Why is the platform itself willing to promote writers with a documented history of hate speech?

Here is the open letter. Thank you for reading.

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Dear Chris, Hamish & Jairaj:

We’re asking a very simple question that has somehow been made complicated: Why are you platforming and monetizing Nazis? 

According to a piece written by Substack publisher Jonathan M. Katz and published by The Atlantic on November 28, this platform has a Nazi problem: 

“Some Substack newsletters by Nazis and white nationalists have thousands or tens of thousands of subscribers, making the platform a new and valuable tool for creating mailing lists for the far right. And many accept paid subscriptions through Substack, seemingly flouting terms of service that ban attempts to ‘publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes’...Substack, which takes a 10 percent cut of subscription revenue, makes money when readers pay for Nazi newsletters.”

As Patrick Casey, a leader of a now-defunct neo-Nazi group who is banned on nearly every other social platform except Substack, wrote on here in 2021: “I’m able to live comfortably doing something I find enjoyable and fulfilling. The cause isn’t going anywhere.” Several Nazis and white supremacists including Richard Spencer not only have paid subscriptions turned on but have received Substack “Bestseller” badges, indicating that they are making at a minimum thousands of dollars a year.

From our perspective as Substack publishers, it is unfathomable that someone with a swastika avatar, who writes about “The Jewish question,” or who promotes Great Replacement Theory, could be given the tools to succeed on your platform. And yet you’ve been unable to adequately explain your position. 

In the past you have defended your decision to platform bigotry by saying you “make decisions based on principles not PR” and “will stick to our hands-off approach to content moderation.” But there’s a difference between a hands-off approach and putting your thumb on the scale. We know you moderate some content, including spam sites and newsletters written by sex workers. Why do you choose to promote and allow the monetization of sites that traffic in white nationalism? 

Your unwillingness to play by your own rules on this issue has already led to the announced departures of several prominent Substackers, including Rusty Foster and Helena Fitzgerald. They follow previous exoduses of writers, including Substack Pro recipient Grace Lavery and Jude Ellison S. Doyle, who left with similar concerns. 

As journalist Casey Newton told his more than 166,000 Substack subscribers after Katz’s piece came out: “The correct number of newsletters using Nazi symbols that you host and profit from on your platform is zero.” 

We, your publishers, want to hear from you on the official Substack newsletter. Is platforming Nazis part of your vision of success? Let us know—from there we can each decide if this is still where we want to be.

Signed, 

Substackers Against Nazis

Thanks for reading. If this letter resonates, please share this post with others. If you’re a publisher who would like to join this collective effort, we encourage you to repost the letter on your own Substack.