once again, fuck nazis and those who support them, who are, basically, nazis

[solarbird]

Substack says it will neither remove nor demonetise Nazi content, that they’re going to keep supporting Nazi content with exposure and money because they think that’s for the best.

You know how I keep banging the “Elon Musk’s experiment with turning Twitter into a fascist propaganda and disinformation fountain must fail” drum? How I keep saying you need to get the fuck off Twitter because this attempt to make money by promoting and funding fascists can’t be allowed to work?

This is one of the biggest fucking reasons why.

And yeah, I’ve called exactly this scenario out. Repeatedly. And now it’s happened. Substack’s owners have decided that funding Nazis and promoting their genocidal content is safe and could be profitable.

Sure, Twitter’s losing money still right now, but if the people stay, then eventually, the advertisers will come back.

Substack have figured that out and are betting on it.

And it’s all because Elon opened the door, and people didn’t fucking walk away. Well, some did – the departure wave was the largest migration away from a site in Internet history.

But it wasn’t close to enough. Most people stayed. And now other social/blogging sites are saying, “Hey, why not Nazis?”

That’s what “stay and fight” gets you on Twitter.

Gods fucking dammit what does it take?

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Comments

[oh6]

People have a hard time coping with the fact that their own pursuit of power in terms of money, social status, political office, etc. is one end of a continuum with the Third Reich at the other end, and 1984's Ingsoc beyond that.

Disavowing fascism requires disavowing the pursuit of power, and it's a long hard road of self-reflection and self-honesty to realize, yeah, that's true, and yeah, they should.

So much I am willing to grant the people who stick around out of simple inertia. The people running these platforms? Ha ha, no. They're old enough to know better. Rudolph Hess got about as much clemency as I'd offer them.

[heron61]

In the medium term (and very possibly the short term) I'm not worried about twitter, since Musk is clearly killing it - not just with nazis, but with increasingly unreliable service - I heard it was periodically down today and expect that to get worse, and at some point people will just leave because of that, because Musk is a complete idiot (as well as a nazi) who clearly rarely takes advice from non-idiots. At this point, I think it's even odd of whether twitter will still exist in any form by next November. OTOH, someone who is a nazi and even slighly less of an idiot could monetize nazi crap, and that's very worrisome.

[stickmaker]

I recalling when the Krupp patriarch returned from a meeting of German business magnates in the early Thirties and proudly proclaimed "We've hired Hitler!"

[solarbird]

It's worrisome because most people who aren't Nazis but who aren't directly targeted won't do a single fucking thing to stop Nazis, including hanging out at the Nazi bar.

[solarbird]

That's one I've missed, but damn if it isn't apt.

[peristaltor]

…the advertisers will come back.

That's my bigger worry. I have trouble seeing a gazillion different business models that all use advertising at the core as anything other than a fail of a single business model.

But there don't seem to be other models.

Ah, well. It will give me something to rant about on the 'cast. ;-)

[solarbird]

If permitting literal nazis gets you more money than not permitting literal nazis, more people will do it. Basically all will.

We absolutely cannot let that happen.

[peristaltor]

Exactly my point.

Go back in history. The actual National Socialists were sponsored by the industrialists and large landowners who feared Bolshevik revolutions in their countries. Thus, Nazis are more a reaction against the people more than they are an ideology in their own right. But as long as they have supporters….

Section 230, as I'm sure you are aware, gives online hosts a pass for views expressed by their users. However, advertising changed the economics of online hosting for a model that gave them more money when they promoted the engaging (read: inflaming more-Nazi) views expressed.

That's why Nazis and their bullshit have spread lately. Advertising.

It is more profitable to "boost" or more widely circulate fascist ideology than it is to remain true to Section 230 and simply allow people to interact without editorial influence.

Which is, of course, a complete violation of Section 230; exercising such profitable editorial influence turns the "hosts" into publishers.

Yet no regulatory agency has stepped in and demanded they abandon their business model as they should.

If they did, and if the hosts simply treated all posts as the business of the users, Nazism (and quite a few other flavors of fringe bullshit) would remain fringe bullshit spewed by nutters and not be as great a problem as it is today.

Again, it's all about the advertising. (But that's just me.)