Substack may be legitimizing neo-Nazis as “thought leaders,” researcher warns.
…well, not like I was planning to move my blog (that nobody reads) to a Neocities page… that might be the final push.
On another matter: I think the right approach is to pressure governments to make hate discourses illegal. Yes, it’s tempting to screech ‘DEPLATFORM!’, and short-term effective, but
- It’s a stop-gap measure; eventually they migrate to another platform. We shouldn’t be playing whack-a-mole with this shit.
- If you give power to a private entity, to get rid of harmful content (like hate speech), eventually it’ll remove non-harmful content when it gets some benefit out of it. Cue to recent events regarding the payment mafia and NSFW games.
Indeed. The only way to move forward are decentralized and federated protocols that resist censorship by design.
With that in mind, check out Ghost as a better replacement for Substack. They have experimental ActivityPub integration too.
I don’t use substack, didn’t even know it existed.
But what did they do exactly? Because this post is so nazi-filled that I think I’m missing the overall picture.
Did they just have an error and send push notifications of unrequested content to people or they started to spam random people with “random” content? Or maybe they did spam for a while now but now the content didn’t get curated enough ?
Substack is an email newsletter platform that supports paid subscriptions. They were exposed a few years ago as allowing Nazis to host their newsletters and make money on their platform; when this became public, the people in charge at Substack said they would not stop allowing Nazis to use the platform, including to be paid for making Nazi content.
This week, they sent out push notifications that actively recommended Nazi content to users.
https://gizmodo.com/substack-sends-push-alert-for-nazi-newsletter-2000636663 has pictures of what they sent exactly.
It’s not a question what did they send but why. Is it just more automated marketing bullshit that is trying to guess what people might like and revomend shit to people? At least the post suggests that.
The whole notion on tracking people interests to promote shit should be banned in the first place IMHO. It only leads to promote shit while filling greedy people pockets.
Recommendations should always be personal like if you Like/subscibe to person X then it could suggest stuff that X thinks if should recommend and it should clearly say “X recommends:” so you know who recommends what, both that you can stop follow people that sold themselfs to highest bidder or have interests not alight with you.
Having automated magic recommendations is always a recipe for disaster (example above) and abuse by the algorithm owner.
If you haven’t noticed, there’s a lot of platforms both quietly and openly tweaking the algorithm to boost Nazi content
This isn’t just normal algorithm stuff, this is something darker. It goes hand in hand with censorship, the Internet is being shaped into a tool of control right in front of our eyes
Hence the issue we should target and fight is the closed/secret algorithm not only focus on the “Nazi incident”. But almost non is talking about it.
It’s not a question what did they send but why.
Since them promoting Nazi content is not an isolated incident at this point it is relevant.
But I do agree with you that algorithms are cancer.
A lot of the independent left news/podcasts are using substack.
