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Substack won’t commit to proactively removing Nazi content, ensuring further fallout

Substack has industry-leading newsletter tools, but its recent content moderation missteps could prove costly.

Between the stated ethos of the company’s leadership and prior controversies that drove many transgender users away from the platform, Substack’s lack of expertise and even active disinterest in the most foundational tools of content moderation were pretty clear early on in its upward trajectory. “And just in case anyone is ever in any doubt: we don’t like or condone bigotry in any form.” The problem is that Substack, in spite of its defense, functionally did, even allowing a monetized newsletter from Unite the Right organizer and prominent white supremacist Richard Spencer. Newton, who has tracked content moderation on traditional social media sites for years, makes a concise case for why Substack increasingly has more in common with those companies — the Facebooks, Twitters and YouTubes — than it does with say Dreamhost:

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