Influential tech news blog Platformer is leaving Substack, a move founder Casey Newton said was due to the company’s resistance to particularly mild pro-Nazi rhetoric.
Newton, who introduced Platformer on Substack in 2020, said the tech news outlet would transfer Ghost, an open-source publisher, to Substack for profit, a transition that is expected to be finalized by Tuesday.
In a lengthy article included in Thursday’s Platformer newsletter, Newton touted how publishing on Substack has helped him grow Platformer since its launch in 2020, from 24,000 free subscribers to more than 170,000.
But, he said, “if Substack can expand a publication like ours so quickly, it can expand other publications as well. “
“Until Substack makes clear that it will take proactive action against hate speech and extremism, the current scale of the challenge is irrelevant. The company’s Edgelord logo ensures that the marginalized will continue to reach out and establish themselves, and its infrastructure creates the option for those publications to grow rapidly. That’s what matters,” Newton said.
The announcement came a day after the company banned five pro-Nazi accounts, and to quell the growing outcry among participants sparked by a November article in The Atlantic that exposed Substack’s hosts (and profits) from many accounts that brazenly sell pro-Nazi and others. white supremacist ideologies.
A participant organization calling itself Substackers Against Nazis published an open letter in December calling on the company to do more to meet the challenge and explains why it hasn’t done so so far.
Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie responded on Dec. 21 with a letter explaining why the company is hesitant to take on such content.
“We don’t like Nazis either; We don’t need anyone to have those perspectives. But other people have been able to do so,” McKenzie wrote. “That said, we don’t censor (including demonetizing posts) it makes the challenge go away; on the contrary, it makes it worse. “