Leading tech journalist quits Substack over platform's Nazi newsletters

Source: The Guardian

Leading tech journalist quits Substack over platform’s Nazi newsletters

Reporter Casey Newton takes more than 170,000 subscribers elsewhere over company’s failure to police extremist content

Kari Paul
Fri 12 Jan 2024 22.58 GMT
Last modified on Fri 12 Jan 2024 23.33 GMT

Platformer, a prominent tech newsletter founded by the veteran reporter Casey Newton, is leaving Substack over the company’s failure to police extremist content.

In a post explaining the decision, Newton said his team had identified seven Substack publications “that conveyed explicit support for 1930s German Nazis and called for violence against Jews, among other groups”. He said after weeks of back-and-forth discussions with company leaders about their “laissez-faire approach to content moderation”, he decided to part ways with the platform.

“We didn’t ask Substack to solve racism,” Newton wrote in a post explaining the decision. “We asked it to give us an easy, low-drama place to do business, and to commit to not funding and accelerating the growth of hate movements. Ultimately we did not get either.”

Newton said Platformer would be migrating to Ghost, an open-source newsletter-publishing platform, and would send its next edition through that route as of Tuesday. Whereas Substack recommends newsletters in a feed on a user’s homepage, Ghost does not, acting less as a social network than a technical infrastructure provider. Ghost also does not provide financial support to writers starting new publications, as Substack has in the past.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/jan/12/casey-newton-quits-substack-nazi-newsletter