Substack makes money from the Nazis being monetized. They don’t monetize out of the kindness of their heart. They take a cut. It should be unacceptable to you that a mainstream company is profiting off of Nazis. It’s worrisome that it isn’t.

Starbucks profits off Nazis whenever one walks in and buys a coffee. The Nazi’s banking institution profits off them when they use an ATM card and get charged a fee. Yes, that’s all acceptable to me.

I should say – someone who’s violent on a daily basis, or posting messages saying “we need to kill Dr. Rosenstein, he lives at (whatever address)”, that’s criminal, and it should be prosecuted. That is some Nazis, yes; like all fascism it’s an inherently violent “politics.” So maybe there’s more overlap between our viewpoints than you’re thinking. I’m just saying that someone who doesn’t do that but does go on and uses Nazi symbology, talks about Hitler, basically a “technically legal” version of this abhorrent viewpoint, that should be allowed. Not because I like it or want it to spread. Because allowing it is the most effective way to combat it. Trying to suppress political speech that most people are going to recoil in abhorrence from, (1) can get used against your political speech, which I can guarantee you some people find as abhorrent as you find the Nazis (2) will not prevent it, just drive it underground and separate it from the exchange of ideas which is the most effective way to defeat it.

Also, I’m worried that you’re defending them making money from Nazis and not their banning sex workers. From OP’s article:

His response similarly doesn’t engage other questions from the Substackers Against Nazis authors, like why these policies allow it to moderate spam and newsletters from sex workers but not Nazis.

Do you “broadly agree” with that? If not, were you even aware of it? Did you read the article?

I’m still confused about this one. Are they banning sex workers? The same comment of mine way up there that linked to Reason.com also linked to a sex worker who’s on Substack. It looks to me like they ban porn, but any non-pornographic newsletters by sex workers is fine.

(Edit: To answer the question, yes I skimmed the article. It’s short in length and on detail. I also tried to read and pay more attention to the original Atlantic article, which seemed a lot more in depth and to the point, but it wanted my credit card and I abandoned the idea.)

(Edit: When I say “able to” or “allowed to” in the following paragraph, I just mean what I like and don’t like. Obviously, in a legal sense, Substack is “allowed to” do whatever they choose with their servers, as is entirely proper since they’re a private company and they own the servers. I’m just using that language, which I chose a little poorly, in order to define what I do and don’t like for them to do with their servers.)

I do think they should be able to delete spam, yes. I do think they should be allowed to ban porn, yes, because that’s not political speech. When I was going to set up a Lemmy instance, I did exactly the same thing; any viewpoint is allowed but no porn. I don’t think they should be allowed to ban non-pornographic newsletters from sex workers. I’d be strongly against them doing that, for the exact same reasons as I wouldn’t want them to ban Nazis. I actually used that example somewhere; sex workers are a perfect example of the next step on the slippery slope that banning Nazis leads to. You ban Nazis, then sex workers, then antivaxxers, then all of a sudden some journalist you agree with is banned, and so on. I think any political / social viewpoint that someone feels, they should be able to type up. Again, that is one of the most effective way to combat Nazis.