In late 2023, The Atlantic reported that Substack was hosting — and taking a 10% cut from — monetized newsletters run by white nationalists and neo-Nazis, some bearing actual swastikas, several run by organizers of the 2017 Charlottesville rally. Around the same time, Nilay Patel pressed Substack CEO Chris Best directly on the platform’s hate speech problem during a Decoder interview. Best had every opportunity to draw a clear line. Instead, he stuttered, squirmed, and couldn’t produce a straight answer — a man who knew exactly what his platform was hosting and couldn’t say so out loud.
When the CEO can’t answer a straight question about Nazis on his platform, you have your answer.
My writing now lives on Cleartext — a newsletter I built and run myself on AWS. No platform taking a cut. No terms of service that somehow don’t apply to Nazis. No surprises.