Influential tech news blog Platformer is leaving Substack, a move founder Casey Newton said because of the company’s resistance to particularly moderate pro-Nazi rhetoric.
Newton, who launched Platformer on Substack in 2020, said the tech news outlet will move to Ghost, an open source publisher similar to the for-profit Substack, a transition expected to finish 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 steps to combat hate speech and extremism, the current scale of the challenge is irrelevant. The company’s Edgelord logo ensures that misfits will continue to arrive and establish themselves, and its infrastructure creates the option for those publications to grow rapidly. That’s what matters,” Newton said.
The announcement came one day after the company banned five pro-Nazi accounts, an attempt to mitigate growing uproar among contributors sparked by a November article in The Atlantic that revealed Substack hosts — and profits — from numerous accounts promoting pro-Nazi and other openly 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 address the problem and explaining why it hasn’t done so until now.
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. “