Substack Faces User Revolt Over Anti-Censorship Stance

Alex Hern reports via the Guardian: The email newsletter service Substack is facing a user revolt after its chief executive defended hosting and handling payments for 'Nazis' on its platform, citing anti-censorship reasons. In a note on the site published in December, the chief executive, Hamish McKenzie, said the firm 'doesn't like Nazis,' and wished 'no one held these views.' But he said the company did not think that censorship -- by demonetising sites that publish extreme views -- was a solution to the problem, and instead made it worse. Some of the largest newsletters on the service have threatened to take their business elsewhere if Substack does not reverse its stance.

On Tuesday Casey Newton, who writes Platformer -- a popular tech newsletter on the platform with thousands of subscribers paying at least $10 a month -- became the most prominent yet. Substack takes a 10% cut of subscriptions from paid newsletters, meaning the loss of Platformer alone could represent six figures of revenue. Other newsletters have already made the jump. Talia Lavin, a journalist with thousands of paid subscribers on her newsletter The Sword and the Sandwich, moved to a competing service, Buttondown, on Tuesday. Substack's leadership team said in a statement: 'As we face growing pressure to censor content published on Substack that to some seems dubious or objectionable, our answer remains the same: we make decisions based on principles not PR, we will defend free expression, and we will stick to our hands-off approach to content moderation.'

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