Why Substack is at a crossroads

Most days, this column looks at controversies unfolding on other tech platforms. Today, let’s take a look at the one that hosts this publication: Substack.

On Tuesday, I told subscribers that we are considering leaving the platform based on the company’s recent statement that it would not demonetize or remove openly Nazi accounts. After Jonathan M. Katz’s November article investigating extremism on the platform in The Atlantic, 247 Substack writers published an open letter asking the company to clarify its policies.

A few days later, Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie responded in a blog post. While the platform would remove publications that are found to make credible threats of violence — a high bar — Substack would otherwise leave them alone, he said. “We don't think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away — in fact, it makes it worse,” he wrote. “We believe that supporting individual rights and civil liberties while subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power.”

McKenzie’s perspective — that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that censorship backfires by making dangerous ideas seem more appealing — is reasonable for many or even most circumstances. It is a point of view that informs policies at many younger, smaller tech platforms, owing both to the techno-libertarian streak that runs through many founders in Silicon Valley and the fact that a hands-off approach to content moderation is easier and less expensive than the alternatives.

There was a time when even Facebook, which has more restrictive policies than Substack does across the board, permitted users to deny the Holocaust. CEO Mark Zuckerberg occasionally cited this policy as evidence of the company’s commitment to free speech, even though it occasionally got him into trouble.

Then, in 2020, Facebook reversed course: going forward, it said, it would remove Holocaust denial from the platform. In doing so, Zuckerberg said, Facebook was seeking to keep pace with the changing times.

Here’s Sheera Frenkel in the New York Times:

In announcing the change, Facebook cited a recent survey that found that nearly a quarter of American adults ages 18 to 39 said they believed the Holocaust either was a myth or was exaggerated, or they weren’t sure whether it happened.

“I’ve struggled with the tension between standing for free expression and the harm caused