on one hand, if you’ve been following news about Substack at all, this is not particularly surprising:
November 2023: Substack has a Nazi problem
January 2024: Substack faces user revolt over anti-censorship stance on neo-Nazis
but on the other hand…this is the kind of thing that will be surprising to a lot of people who aren’t savvy media consumers. if they thought about Substack at all they probably thought of it as just “that website with all the newsletters”.
many of those people had the Substack app installed on their phones.
they got a push notification. the icon of the push notification was a swastika.
imagine looking at the list of notifications on your phone and just…seeing a whole-ass swastika.
I would compare this to the time Elon Musk called that cave diver in Thailand a “pedo guy”. he was a shitbag before that, he was a shitbag after that, but that was still a watershed moment when a lot of people had the sudden realization of “oh, huh, this guy’s a shitbag”.
Substack has been a Nazi bar for a few years now. they started allowing customers of the bar to hang up flags on the front patio. today was the day they hung up a Nazi flag.
some more history:
April 2023: Substack CEO Chris Best Doesn’t Realize He’s Just Become The Nazi Bar
December 2023: Substack Turns On Its ‘Nazis Welcome!’ Sign
Why don’t payment processors go after stuff like this🤔
Because there are no rich connected socialite interest groups that frequent same country clubs as the payment processor C suites who care about nazi’s, in fact, the same people pushing fash politics at sub stack probably go to the same country club.
Maybe they will if someone or sie org forces then sit it?
I have an addon called uBlacklist, it blocks substack from showing up in search results. And I have it blocked in uBlock Origin as well. Anyone on the Fediverse promoting it also gets blocked. It’s nice to erase nazis from your feed and their enablers.
https://sightlessscribbles.com/posts/20250425/ also has a good list of grievances
My knee-jerk reaction to that kind of headline is always to start mentally typing out a response warning of inflationary use of the term “Nazi”, but… er yeah, I guess that’s a Nazi blog alright.
My knee-jerk reaction to that kind of headline is always to start mentally typing out a response warning of inflationary use of the term “Nazi”, but…
Since there’s a lot of nazis around lately, I’m glad you’re learning to control this reaction
Have you not been paying attention?
To what? 😶
gestures around widely
They just want Lebensraum.
