After Nearly 4 Years, Hatemail Is Leaving Substack.
This is the last news round up you'll receive from us on this platform.
After much consideration, the LaBac hacker collective has decided that hatemail will be leaving Substack. We will be taking a newsletter break the next few weeks to weigh platform alternatives and to migrate our content.
This decision follows the recent controversy around Substack platforming and monetizing Nazi writers as well as Substack’s disappointing response to concerned creators about the issue. And with Substack’s growth from simple hosting software into a more robust space for algorithmic content, it matters to us how the company chooses to moderate the content it makes money from. As Casey Newton at the Platformer eloquently put it: “I’m not aware of any major US consumer internet platform that does not explicitly ban praise for Nazi hate speech, much less one that welcomes them to set up shop and start selling subscriptions.”
Critics of our choice to leave may feel that we don’t support freedom of speech here at hatemail, but nothing could be further from the truth. In 2020, we moved to Substack from MailChimp’s TinyLetter platform over MailChimp’s agressive censorship of queer and sex-positive content. We deeply care about freedom of speech and it’s not lost on us that we are, once again, moving hatemail due to a platform’s content moderation choices. But framing the way Substack is handling their Nazi problem as a laudable adherence to freedom of speech is poor judgment at best.
Freedom of speech is a value that is often used to encourage the protection of marginalized ideas. To speak truth to power. To safeguard the voices of the disenfranchised. But white supremacy is not an idea that comes from the disenfranchised. It’s an idea that has historically shaped the foundations of the most currently powerful political institutions on planet Earth. White supremacy may be considered an unpopular idea to explicitly support (because our species has seen the inhumanity of its ideological endpoint in political movements such as Nazism) but it certainly is not a marginalized one.
Thank you for your patience while we try to find the best platform for hatemail…one that doesn't support Nazis.

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