Substack scares the hell out of legacy media, of all stripes, because it's the biggest threat ever to their control over information and its concomitant benefit, money. I've made more from Substack in two years that I did in decades as a columnist in legacy media AND I don't get 22-year old copy editors censoring my ideas they find uncomfortable.
Martin: Is the lack of an editor and fact-checkers with a stake in the long-term credibility of a journalistic organization improving the accuracy of your writing? IMO, this seems unlikely since testing your work on others almost certainly brings to light things you have missed.
How do you resting the temptation to write increasingly sensational stories that will attract more readers. If you don't arouse passions, few will be willing to pay. Don't you need something like an "Censorship Industrial Complex" to arouse readers passions, despite the fact that it is perfectly legal for Internet Platforms to censor content that offends them, their community or their advertisers? Isn't viral click-bait one of the main causes of our increasing political polarization?
Granny and Phisto: I'd like to hear what Martin has to say. Back in the days of Hearst, yellow journalists got rich off of sensational stories like the explosion of the Maine that started the Spanish American war. In the following decades, journalism more professional and established rules that enabled them to better serve readers. Remember the tradition of always interviewing people from both sides of a controversy and trying to present an unbiased summary of what they heard? Do you really think going back to a more laissez faire system where no one has to follow any rules, and has their reporting challenged and fact checked is producing better journalism or minimizing the effect of money on the product. Not in general. The founders of Substack are getting rich providing you with access to journalist with every incentive to tell you what you are looking to hear, not what you need to know.
Today, Trump can easily bankrupt Fox News or any other right wing organization by taking his audience to OAN, causing them to
Legacy media sources have been the biggest purveyors of false and sensationalist rhetoric in the past several years. They are largely unaware of that, because they are in a bubble, and believe a lot of the misinformation they spew.
Matt Taibbi wrote a book critical of Trump called "Insane Clown President". Yet he was ostracized for fact checking false accusations against Trump leveled by mainstream sources.
As Matt characterized the attacks on him (paraphrased):
"Hey, how much could you possibly hate him (Trump), if you aren't willing to make [stuff] up about him?
Rings true.
Mainstream media have become a joke, and to a large extent have made themselves irrelevant - deservedly so. Newspapers no longer even attempt to differentiate between straight reporting and opinion - it seems they don't even know how, or that it once was standard procedure, enforced by editors.
If there is fact checking at all, it is shoddy and ideologically based. As for editors spotting and removing editorializing from within straight reporting? It is certainly not happening to any high degree at legacy newspapers, let alone other legacy media. That is before you even consider the facts and stories which go against the establishment narratives - which are simply not heard except from alternate sources.
Improving the quality of journalism will only occur through freedom of speech, and competition in the news marketplace.
The success of Substack is a symptom of the failure of legacy news sources, and a big part of the cure.
An additional poor practice of mainstream media is to apparently just publish press releases as if they are news, with no criticism or examination. Every single day of the year, one can find a distributed press release from some NGO or Corporation with content which is blatantly false, just based on the laws of physics, chemistry, or biology, and the mainstream media publishes it and promulgates it as fact.
Or consider the UCS story on asthma from gas stoves which they almost immediately retracted as not supported, yet the media continues to reference it without pointing out the UCS's embarrassing gafe, presumably because it supports WEFs/Biden's desire to take away our reliable appliances.
“The founders of Substack are getting rich providing you with access to journalist with every incentive to tell you what you are looking to hear, not what you need to know.”
Is your last name “Burns” by chance?
Do you even comprehend yourself? You just told a bunch of GROWN HUMAN BEINGS living in a FREE country that you believe there should be some arbiter of information.
It’s so incredibly condescending. You never imagine a world where someone is deciding that for you, do you? You probably imagine yourself on the decision side of the matrix.
I sure as heck don’t want to live in a country like that.
Recently I saw someone else say pretty much the same thing...
Obama is a ridiculous, maybe craven and corrupt, liar. He ignores a large body of evidence (some in court documents in the Missouri vs Biden federal court case) about the illegal, government funded censorship-industrial-complex which primarily benefits the Democratic Party, now the party of coastal elites, the professional-managerial-class, tech oligarchs and globalists and the party that throws the working classes under the bus.
If mainstream media still followed journalistic practices that distinguished fact from opinion, and determined fact by questioning perceived events and narratives and finding multiple sources, and getting quotes from notable opponents, then yes they might be worth reading more than an unedited substack.
I disagree. The financial temptation to sensationalize, and tell readers the one-sided story they want to hear - not what they need to hear - is almost certainly far greater at a Substack than with the MSM. When asked to defend this opinion I didn't a quick survey of the headline stories at the NYT and at the WSJ and found no significant sensationalizing in the major news compared with the headlines here at Public. Do your own test. (The WSJ's editorial page is the private fief of some elite conservative intellectuals has different management and policies than the rest of the WSJ and is filled with click-bait.) Corrections? The MSM publishes some corrections and their liberal competitors have found most of the big mistakes.
Public recently published a scoop that the US government would be naming three Chinese researchers from the Wuhan lab as Patient Zero. Totally false. The government denied having any definitive information about two of these men, but the third didn't even have appropriate symptoms for COVID. Early in the US pandemic, only 10-20% of those with appropriate symptoms were testing positive by PCR and millions have symptoms of respiratory illnesses every winter. When we are attempting to identify Patient Zero, we are literally trying to find 1 person in millions. Patients with mild or asymptomatic illnesses have made it impossible to trace backwards from the earliest known patients in December to Patient Zero. (The US government did say that the Chinese almost undoubtedly paid close attention to the illness of these three researchers and kept samples that would be definitive.
Exposure to counter-speech is essential in learning the Truth. If a Substack recruited competing experts to write about an important controversy, agree upon common facts and justify and rebut differences of opinion, it would be worth reading. Being exposed to counter speech before reaching a conclusion is the only way to find the truth. The best place to do that is with the National Constitution Centers podcasts about important cases at the Supreme Court. By charter, their purpose is to educate Americans about the Constitution from a non-partisan perspective. Want to learn the FACTS about why Trump may not be qualified to serve again under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, followed by respectful discussion of the merits of each case from a prominent member of the Federalist Society and a liberal equivalent? Listen to their latest podcast, which I haven't heard yet. (I predict they will both agree that Trump is technically unqualified to serve again, but that the Court won't want to make a determination on that issue and leave it to the voters.)
But I can't agree to trust the reporting of NYT and others when they have been so willing to toe (or advance) the Democratic / progressive / anti-Trump party line on a litany of events and issues for the last several years. Independent journalistic on substack provide the opposing or alternate views that MSM frequently does not. I don't believe their reporting is as comprehensive and balanced as it once was.
Interesting expose into your thoughts. Most news headlines are sensationalized to attract readers. Most news content is word-smithed to arouse readers.
In fact, we are commenting on a post that exposes a “news” writer who concocted a sensationalized story written to arouse its nazi-phobic readers, -- all done to undermine its press competitor.
I did a quick check of todays the headlines for the NYT and WSJ to check for sensationalized headlines and was surprised to find few were highly sensationalized. The WSJ had two sensational headlines: "Wanted: College Presidents. Mission: Impossible" and "Why It Feels Like Everyone You Know Is getting COVID-19". However, both articles were highly factual. I'ver heard about software that evaluated the emotional content of writing and AI that can suggest alternative wording that arouses fewer passions. However, arousing fewer passions would be suicide for most substack authors. In the interests of providing better and healthier information for customers, Substack could evaluate their authors and warn readers from them - but that would be suicidal too.
Adfontesmedia.com and alludes.com try to provide some systematic evaluation of the reliability of media sources. The link below contains older and simpler data from ad fontes. Unfortunately no one seems to address the sensationalization/clickbait aspects of modern media. However, it has been repeatedly established by experiments that sensational lies travel further and faster on the internet than the truth.
Experience on the internet has show that every unprotected site eventually get polluted with porn, extremist ideologies like Nazism or bullies. If you have some sort of community, moderation is probably needed and essential if you depend on advertisers. I'm pretty cynical, so I expect Substack to tolerate Nazi symbols and messages as long as they are attracting attention and readers; but when they begin to cost real money they will be banned. If it were my website and I was watching hundreds of thousands of Americans die from vaccine hesitancy, I'd ban vaccine disinformation in the absence of effective counter speech. Pandemics kill more people than wars, and censorship is common during wars. The same for Russian disinformation. Doing both jobs well would be nearly impossible, but I'm currently sick of all the liars out there. However, when Trump gets re-elected and starts censoring information I like, I'll probably probably oppose his censorship. As I said, I'm cynical and struggling to find a position I will be able to defend 100% of the time. Actually, that's easy: Private censorship is moderation and tolerable. Government censorship is intolerable as is government coercion of private censorship.
Liberals of the 1970s (I'm thinking ACLU supporters) were adults who'd lived through (and often served in) wars, depressions, violent civil strife etc, and knew that the only way to build and defend a durable liberal democracy and civil society was to apply equal rights to all, no matter how stupid or odious, because the only other choice was once again setting up an omnipotent arbiter, which is just another form of dictatorship—they also had faith that their fellow citizens weren't potential monsters because they'd lived and mixed among all types and classes, and hadn't been raised in an ivory tower where unapproved thoughts and opinions were considered intolerable moral pollution;
Liberals of the 2020s are coddled infants raised in safe spaces under the auspices of their helicopter parents and received educations crafted to make sure they never felt unsafe, uncomfortable or "unseen". They think of every place or forum they attend as akin to the Chuck E. Cheese they had their 8th bday party in—not only do they want mom and the manager to kick that yucky kid out, they want him out of the parking lot and maybe even expelled from school and/or jailed. They simply cannot rest easy until the world and everyone in it is transformed into a self-flattering mirror where everyone agrees with them and also agrees that they're wise, compassionate and superior.
The former group helped bequeath us a flourishing liberal democracy with a vibrant creative culture; the latter group would have us all live inside a totalitarian playpen, as long as they get to pick the toys and crayons.
Tell Jonathan Katz the cities are crawling with Jew haters, they're out and about protesting almost every night—if he really is the reincarnation of Simon Wiesenthal, he should put down the computer and hit the streets. Something tells me that would make him feel even more "unsafe".
"...latter group would have us all live inside a totalitarian playpen, as long as they get to pick the toys and crayons" Love this. Stealing it. Don't worry, I'll be sure to credit it to "some random guy on the internet". :)
iberals of the 1970s (I'm thinking ACLU supporters) were adults who'd lived through (and often served in) wars, depressions, violent civil strife etc, and knew that the only way to build and defend a durable liberal democracy and civil society was to apply equal rights to all, no matter how stupid or odious, because the only other choice was once again setting up an omnipotent arbiter, which is just another form of dictatorship—they also had faith that their fellow citizens weren't potential monsters because they'd lived and mixed among all types and classes, and hadn't been raised in an ivory tower where unapproved thoughts and opinions were considered intolerable moral pollution;
Liberals of the 2020s are coddled infants raised in safe spaces under the auspices of their helicopter parents and received educations crafted to make sure they never felt unsafe, uncomfortable or "unseen". They think of every place or forum they attend as akin to the Chuck E. Cheese they had their 8th bday party in—not only do they want mom and the manager to kick that yucky kid out, they want him out of the parking lot and maybe even expelled from school and/or jailed. They simply cannot rest easy until the world and everyone in it is transformed into a self-flattering mirror where everyone agrees with them and also agrees that they're wise, compassionate and superior.
The former group helped bequeath us a flourishing liberal democracy with a vibrant creative culture; the latter group would have us all live inside a totalitarian playpen, as long as they get to pick the toys and crayons.
Tell Jonathan Katz the cities are crawling with Jew haters, they're out and about protesting almost every night—if he really is the reincarnation of Simon Wiesenthal, he should put down the computer and hit the streets. Something tells me that would make him feel even more "unsafe".
It's worth considering that the Nazi attacks might be just an excuse to delegitimize Substack so they can limit its reach and eventually shut it down. That's how the censorship/propaganda industrial complex has been working, and now it seems to be focusing its Sauron gaze on the only corners of free speech left: Substack and Rumble
As Charles Hayward writes, "[T]he Regime is Left, root and branch, but reality has a very strong right-wing bias. As a result, Regime control is fundamentally unnatural and thus eternally fragile. Therefore much of the energy of the Regime is spent desperately trying to convince the masses that reality is something other than what it is." Substack (and Rumble plus others) serves as an existential threat to the Marxist narrative.
From the Twitter/X Files to the Substack files: "A source at Substack told Public that Newton’s list contains just 6 Substacks with 29 paid subscribers between them, a tiny fraction of the more than 2 million paid subscribers the service has today." 29/2,000,000 = 0.001%.
Perhaps we should hall monitor the hall monitors, or subvert the subverters if you will. Newton has suspiciously low engagement rates for 174,000 subscribers; most of his posts get under 100 likes. Many left-leaning Substacks have similarly weak ratios, though I'm sure the Nazi hysteria helped them all gain new readers who like and comment on censorship. Same goes for Katz and Princeton plagiarist Kevin Kruse, both of whom have not left Substack despite their threats.
Yuri, you're like, everywhere! I see your comments on just about every Susbtack I subscribe to, saved for the non political ones. And your comments always appear among the firsts. How do you find the time to read so many different articles and respond so quickly, and publish your own Substack? Someone needs to hire you for their rapid response team.
This is just deflection from the other topics they don't want to discuss. Capture of Harvard and the education industrial complex, deflect. Government funded censorship, deflect. Health policies that probably killed more people than they helped, deflect. Don't you see, its the hate speech that is causing all the problems!!
The fantastic irony that it is the captured institutions, especially main stream media and university presidents, cannot see that it is precisely their policies that have caused the lack of faith in institutions. Nope, must be the allowance of free speech. If we would all just shut up and listen, things would be great.
Also, greatly appreciated the historical context of how these laws backfire. Again, the irony is magnanimous and somehow entirely missed by those who can't use a mirror.
Didn't end up well in the 30's and 40's either....given our national tendency to 'celebrate' national disgraces by reenacting them on 100 year and 50 year anniversaries (Civil War re-do in the 1960's, Civil Rights redo 2015's) - I'd say it's going get really nasty in another 10 years when our "Anti-Fascist" protectors come to "save us"....
Since literally anyone who challenges establishment narratives is a Nazi I am pretty sure if Substack gave in more than just a few Substacks would be gone.
Freddie DeBoer wrote about that. He's a self described Marxist, but because he doesn't go along with the party line, they'd call him a Nazi so they could get rid of him.
It seems strange at first glance that there is so much hand wringing over such a small number of Substack newsletters with so few subscribers. I hate that I've become so cynical and suspicious, but, for the moment I'm assuming that their hope is that with so few newsletters earning so little money, the owners of Substack will cave under pressure, thinking these few are not worth the trouble. After that, their virginity will be lost. I have no doubt that, as we've seen happen elsewhere, part of the deal to have the agitators stop agitating, Substack will be pressured to hire agitator approved compliance officers.
First it will be Nazis, then other white supremacists, then people who have knowingly spoken to white supremacists, then those who spoke with them unknowingly, etc.
Next thing you know, everyone will be walking on eggshells.
Welcome, Nazi D-bags. I’ve read your shit, and all I can say is I hope at some point in your lives you find peace in the world. All 29 of you?
Substack, I greatly appreciate you sticking to your guns and defending our right to free speech. Had you not, I’m guessing you would have been left with around 200 paid subscribers.
Don't you worry, the Feds will fix that lack of Nazis problem, posthaste!!!
Just like the Feds started White Supremacist conspiracy to kidnap Gov Whitmer and seeded the J6 crowd with lots of operatives to get that Insurrection going, they'll start pushing a Nazi agenda here on Substack, to prove America has a Fascism problem.
Meanwhile, let's ignore that pedophile problem over at Instagram, or the died suddenly pandemic from the vaccines, or the open border "immigration", or the real Nazi support in Ukraine, nope, let's worry about 26 Nazis on Substack.
Disinformation I meant. It was part of their pretext for the invasion. Ukraine has about the same level of Nazi problem as Substack. Their president is Jewish.
The ability to speak freely and express idea literally despite how bad they maybe is critical to human flourishing. As has been said many time before. Free speech only matters if you are willing to defend speech you despise. As humans created in the image of God we must be allowed to think.
"The people clamoring for Substack to restrict Nazi speech.....<show> a knee-jerk inability to cope with things they dislike. "
You are being way to generous. They are authoritarians. By their words and actions they show themselves to be Nazis. They want to destroy dissent just like any totalitarian. Their focus on Nazis is a mask designed to hide their intent.
I've seen one Nazi on Substack but he alienates everyone, but I have seen about a thousand "anti-nazi's" acting like authoritarian's. Most of them when I point out this isn't about Nazis because they want to control Substack like Google and Meta, etc, they ban me just like they would if they controlled Substack.
The hypocrisy here is what rankles me. The same people and legacy media types who are soooo concerned with Nazi inciting violence from the written word of a tiny, tiny fraction of posts on this platform, seem to show very little concern for the many voices in major cities and U.S. college campus calling for literal genocide if the Jews. If one of the primary views of Nazism is antisemitism, why is the label not being given to the pro-Hamas protestors? Arguably, their protests would be MORE likely to incite violence than 6 newsletter with a minuscule amount of subscribers.
Forty years ago neo-Nazis wanted to march in Skokie, a heavily Jewish suburb of Chicago and the ACLU successfully defended their right to do so. Substack is carrying on that tradition, even if today’s ACLU isn’t. Bravo Substack..
"To say that Substack has a “Nazi problem” because of a handful of pages almost nobody reads – and the platform almost certainly barely makes any money off of – exist on the platform would be kind of like saying the 1st Amendment has a “Nazi problem” because there are a handful of white nationalists and neo-Nazis in America who have their rights to speech and assembly protected as well. "
The "Nazi problem" is a Trojan horse. They start there, knowing that most people find those ideas aberrant, but then they use the precedent to crack down on dissent, which is the real goal. It is a feature, not a bug. Look at how the laws in Germany have been misused to prosecute CJ Hopkins for criticizing the government, even though those laws are ineffective at preventing actual antisemitism, as you note.
Substack scares the hell out of legacy media, of all stripes, because it's the biggest threat ever to their control over information and its concomitant benefit, money. I've made more from Substack in two years that I did in decades as a columnist in legacy media AND I don't get 22-year old copy editors censoring my ideas they find uncomfortable.
Perfectly said.
WORD!! :)
Martin: Is the lack of an editor and fact-checkers with a stake in the long-term credibility of a journalistic organization improving the accuracy of your writing? IMO, this seems unlikely since testing your work on others almost certainly brings to light things you have missed.
How do you resting the temptation to write increasingly sensational stories that will attract more readers. If you don't arouse passions, few will be willing to pay. Don't you need something like an "Censorship Industrial Complex" to arouse readers passions, despite the fact that it is perfectly legal for Internet Platforms to censor content that offends them, their community or their advertisers? Isn't viral click-bait one of the main causes of our increasing political polarization?
I suspect Martin has integrity and doesn't need middle men to fly cover.
You forget the old ways, Frank.
Granny and Phisto: I'd like to hear what Martin has to say. Back in the days of Hearst, yellow journalists got rich off of sensational stories like the explosion of the Maine that started the Spanish American war. In the following decades, journalism more professional and established rules that enabled them to better serve readers. Remember the tradition of always interviewing people from both sides of a controversy and trying to present an unbiased summary of what they heard? Do you really think going back to a more laissez faire system where no one has to follow any rules, and has their reporting challenged and fact checked is producing better journalism or minimizing the effect of money on the product. Not in general. The founders of Substack are getting rich providing you with access to journalist with every incentive to tell you what you are looking to hear, not what you need to know.
Today, Trump can easily bankrupt Fox News or any other right wing organization by taking his audience to OAN, causing them to
Legacy media sources have been the biggest purveyors of false and sensationalist rhetoric in the past several years. They are largely unaware of that, because they are in a bubble, and believe a lot of the misinformation they spew.
Matt Taibbi wrote a book critical of Trump called "Insane Clown President". Yet he was ostracized for fact checking false accusations against Trump leveled by mainstream sources.
As Matt characterized the attacks on him (paraphrased):
"Hey, how much could you possibly hate him (Trump), if you aren't willing to make [stuff] up about him?
Rings true.
Mainstream media have become a joke, and to a large extent have made themselves irrelevant - deservedly so. Newspapers no longer even attempt to differentiate between straight reporting and opinion - it seems they don't even know how, or that it once was standard procedure, enforced by editors.
If there is fact checking at all, it is shoddy and ideologically based. As for editors spotting and removing editorializing from within straight reporting? It is certainly not happening to any high degree at legacy newspapers, let alone other legacy media. That is before you even consider the facts and stories which go against the establishment narratives - which are simply not heard except from alternate sources.
Improving the quality of journalism will only occur through freedom of speech, and competition in the news marketplace.
The success of Substack is a symptom of the failure of legacy news sources, and a big part of the cure.
An additional poor practice of mainstream media is to apparently just publish press releases as if they are news, with no criticism or examination. Every single day of the year, one can find a distributed press release from some NGO or Corporation with content which is blatantly false, just based on the laws of physics, chemistry, or biology, and the mainstream media publishes it and promulgates it as fact.
Or consider the UCS story on asthma from gas stoves which they almost immediately retracted as not supported, yet the media continues to reference it without pointing out the UCS's embarrassing gafe, presumably because it supports WEFs/Biden's desire to take away our reliable appliances.
“The founders of Substack are getting rich providing you with access to journalist with every incentive to tell you what you are looking to hear, not what you need to know.”
Is your last name “Burns” by chance?
Do you even comprehend yourself? You just told a bunch of GROWN HUMAN BEINGS living in a FREE country that you believe there should be some arbiter of information.
It’s so incredibly condescending. You never imagine a world where someone is deciding that for you, do you? You probably imagine yourself on the decision side of the matrix.
I sure as heck don’t want to live in a country like that.
Recently I saw someone else say pretty much the same thing...
https://youtu.be/LH6kq3HhjgQ?feature=shared
HA! See! I knew that he was a Paid Troll.
Thanks for the link.
re: https://youtu.be/LH6kq3HhjgQ?feature=shared
(https://public.substack.com/p/censors-are-trying-to-trick-you-into/comment/46699900)
MAKE ORWELL FICTION AGAIN
Obama is a ridiculous, maybe craven and corrupt, liar. He ignores a large body of evidence (some in court documents in the Missouri vs Biden federal court case) about the illegal, government funded censorship-industrial-complex which primarily benefits the Democratic Party, now the party of coastal elites, the professional-managerial-class, tech oligarchs and globalists and the party that throws the working classes under the bus.
If mainstream media still followed journalistic practices that distinguished fact from opinion, and determined fact by questioning perceived events and narratives and finding multiple sources, and getting quotes from notable opponents, then yes they might be worth reading more than an unedited substack.
I disagree. The financial temptation to sensationalize, and tell readers the one-sided story they want to hear - not what they need to hear - is almost certainly far greater at a Substack than with the MSM. When asked to defend this opinion I didn't a quick survey of the headline stories at the NYT and at the WSJ and found no significant sensationalizing in the major news compared with the headlines here at Public. Do your own test. (The WSJ's editorial page is the private fief of some elite conservative intellectuals has different management and policies than the rest of the WSJ and is filled with click-bait.) Corrections? The MSM publishes some corrections and their liberal competitors have found most of the big mistakes.
Public recently published a scoop that the US government would be naming three Chinese researchers from the Wuhan lab as Patient Zero. Totally false. The government denied having any definitive information about two of these men, but the third didn't even have appropriate symptoms for COVID. Early in the US pandemic, only 10-20% of those with appropriate symptoms were testing positive by PCR and millions have symptoms of respiratory illnesses every winter. When we are attempting to identify Patient Zero, we are literally trying to find 1 person in millions. Patients with mild or asymptomatic illnesses have made it impossible to trace backwards from the earliest known patients in December to Patient Zero. (The US government did say that the Chinese almost undoubtedly paid close attention to the illness of these three researchers and kept samples that would be definitive.
You are a depraved, evil liar. Presumably a s0r0z tr0ll. Fuck off asshole.
Exposure to counter-speech is essential in learning the Truth. If a Substack recruited competing experts to write about an important controversy, agree upon common facts and justify and rebut differences of opinion, it would be worth reading. Being exposed to counter speech before reaching a conclusion is the only way to find the truth. The best place to do that is with the National Constitution Centers podcasts about important cases at the Supreme Court. By charter, their purpose is to educate Americans about the Constitution from a non-partisan perspective. Want to learn the FACTS about why Trump may not be qualified to serve again under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, followed by respectful discussion of the merits of each case from a prominent member of the Federalist Society and a liberal equivalent? Listen to their latest podcast, which I haven't heard yet. (I predict they will both agree that Trump is technically unqualified to serve again, but that the Court won't want to make a determination on that issue and leave it to the voters.)
The podcast you recommend sounds good.
But I can't agree to trust the reporting of NYT and others when they have been so willing to toe (or advance) the Democratic / progressive / anti-Trump party line on a litany of events and issues for the last several years. Independent journalistic on substack provide the opposing or alternate views that MSM frequently does not. I don't believe their reporting is as comprehensive and balanced as it once was.
Liar.
TR0LL.
***REMINDER***
Senior journalism professor explains the corruption and failures of the "mainstream" corporate media.
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-ed-note.php
www. cjr. org /special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-ed-note.php
Read this, tr0ll
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-ed-note.php
I imagine Martin has faith in his readers to know sh*# from shineola, and is concerned about building a good reputation
Interesting expose into your thoughts. Most news headlines are sensationalized to attract readers. Most news content is word-smithed to arouse readers.
In fact, we are commenting on a post that exposes a “news” writer who concocted a sensationalized story written to arouse its nazi-phobic readers, -- all done to undermine its press competitor.
I did a quick check of todays the headlines for the NYT and WSJ to check for sensationalized headlines and was surprised to find few were highly sensationalized. The WSJ had two sensational headlines: "Wanted: College Presidents. Mission: Impossible" and "Why It Feels Like Everyone You Know Is getting COVID-19". However, both articles were highly factual. I'ver heard about software that evaluated the emotional content of writing and AI that can suggest alternative wording that arouses fewer passions. However, arousing fewer passions would be suicide for most substack authors. In the interests of providing better and healthier information for customers, Substack could evaluate their authors and warn readers from them - but that would be suicidal too.
Adfontesmedia.com and alludes.com try to provide some systematic evaluation of the reliability of media sources. The link below contains older and simpler data from ad fontes. Unfortunately no one seems to address the sensationalization/clickbait aspects of modern media. However, it has been repeatedly established by experiments that sensational lies travel further and faster on the internet than the truth.
https://www.poynter.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Media-Bias-Chart-6.0_Low_Res_Licensed.jpg
Experience on the internet has show that every unprotected site eventually get polluted with porn, extremist ideologies like Nazism or bullies. If you have some sort of community, moderation is probably needed and essential if you depend on advertisers. I'm pretty cynical, so I expect Substack to tolerate Nazi symbols and messages as long as they are attracting attention and readers; but when they begin to cost real money they will be banned. If it were my website and I was watching hundreds of thousands of Americans die from vaccine hesitancy, I'd ban vaccine disinformation in the absence of effective counter speech. Pandemics kill more people than wars, and censorship is common during wars. The same for Russian disinformation. Doing both jobs well would be nearly impossible, but I'm currently sick of all the liars out there. However, when Trump gets re-elected and starts censoring information I like, I'll probably probably oppose his censorship. As I said, I'm cynical and struggling to find a position I will be able to defend 100% of the time. Actually, that's easy: Private censorship is moderation and tolerable. Government censorship is intolerable as is government coercion of private censorship.
Liar. Gaslighter. Tr0ll.
1. he explained why the old system doesn't work, or is dysfunctional, and
2. he presumably gets feedback from his substack readers, unless he censors valid criticism.
Liberals of the 1970s (I'm thinking ACLU supporters) were adults who'd lived through (and often served in) wars, depressions, violent civil strife etc, and knew that the only way to build and defend a durable liberal democracy and civil society was to apply equal rights to all, no matter how stupid or odious, because the only other choice was once again setting up an omnipotent arbiter, which is just another form of dictatorship—they also had faith that their fellow citizens weren't potential monsters because they'd lived and mixed among all types and classes, and hadn't been raised in an ivory tower where unapproved thoughts and opinions were considered intolerable moral pollution;
Liberals of the 2020s are coddled infants raised in safe spaces under the auspices of their helicopter parents and received educations crafted to make sure they never felt unsafe, uncomfortable or "unseen". They think of every place or forum they attend as akin to the Chuck E. Cheese they had their 8th bday party in—not only do they want mom and the manager to kick that yucky kid out, they want him out of the parking lot and maybe even expelled from school and/or jailed. They simply cannot rest easy until the world and everyone in it is transformed into a self-flattering mirror where everyone agrees with them and also agrees that they're wise, compassionate and superior.
The former group helped bequeath us a flourishing liberal democracy with a vibrant creative culture; the latter group would have us all live inside a totalitarian playpen, as long as they get to pick the toys and crayons.
Tell Jonathan Katz the cities are crawling with Jew haters, they're out and about protesting almost every night—if he really is the reincarnation of Simon Wiesenthal, he should put down the computer and hit the streets. Something tells me that would make him feel even more "unsafe".
"...latter group would have us all live inside a totalitarian playpen, as long as they get to pick the toys and crayons" Love this. Stealing it. Don't worry, I'll be sure to credit it to "some random guy on the internet". :)
Steal it without attribution and you might be eligible to become the next president of Harvard.
iberals of the 1970s (I'm thinking ACLU supporters) were adults who'd lived through (and often served in) wars, depressions, violent civil strife etc, and knew that the only way to build and defend a durable liberal democracy and civil society was to apply equal rights to all, no matter how stupid or odious, because the only other choice was once again setting up an omnipotent arbiter, which is just another form of dictatorship—they also had faith that their fellow citizens weren't potential monsters because they'd lived and mixed among all types and classes, and hadn't been raised in an ivory tower where unapproved thoughts and opinions were considered intolerable moral pollution;
Liberals of the 2020s are coddled infants raised in safe spaces under the auspices of their helicopter parents and received educations crafted to make sure they never felt unsafe, uncomfortable or "unseen". They think of every place or forum they attend as akin to the Chuck E. Cheese they had their 8th bday party in—not only do they want mom and the manager to kick that yucky kid out, they want him out of the parking lot and maybe even expelled from school and/or jailed. They simply cannot rest easy until the world and everyone in it is transformed into a self-flattering mirror where everyone agrees with them and also agrees that they're wise, compassionate and superior.
The former group helped bequeath us a flourishing liberal democracy with a vibrant creative culture; the latter group would have us all live inside a totalitarian playpen, as long as they get to pick the toys and crayons.
Tell Jonathan Katz the cities are crawling with Jew haters, they're out and about protesting almost every night—if he really is the reincarnation of Simon Wiesenthal, he should put down the computer and hit the streets. Something tells me that would make him feel even more "unsafe".
wow i liked it even better when someone else wrote it ;))
feel free!
thanks!
It's worth considering that the Nazi attacks might be just an excuse to delegitimize Substack so they can limit its reach and eventually shut it down. That's how the censorship/propaganda industrial complex has been working, and now it seems to be focusing its Sauron gaze on the only corners of free speech left: Substack and Rumble
As Charles Hayward writes, "[T]he Regime is Left, root and branch, but reality has a very strong right-wing bias. As a result, Regime control is fundamentally unnatural and thus eternally fragile. Therefore much of the energy of the Regime is spent desperately trying to convince the masses that reality is something other than what it is." Substack (and Rumble plus others) serves as an existential threat to the Marxist narrative.
and you know it. There is absolutely nothing the Left won't eventually attempt to crush. It's in their DNA.
From the Twitter/X Files to the Substack files: "A source at Substack told Public that Newton’s list contains just 6 Substacks with 29 paid subscribers between them, a tiny fraction of the more than 2 million paid subscribers the service has today." 29/2,000,000 = 0.001%.
Perhaps we should hall monitor the hall monitors, or subvert the subverters if you will. Newton has suspiciously low engagement rates for 174,000 subscribers; most of his posts get under 100 likes. Many left-leaning Substacks have similarly weak ratios, though I'm sure the Nazi hysteria helped them all gain new readers who like and comment on censorship. Same goes for Katz and Princeton plagiarist Kevin Kruse, both of whom have not left Substack despite their threats.
Are they all bots reading bots? https://substack.com/@yuribezmenov/note/c-46668227
Yuri, you're like, everywhere! I see your comments on just about every Susbtack I subscribe to, saved for the non political ones. And your comments always appear among the firsts. How do you find the time to read so many different articles and respond so quickly, and publish your own Substack? Someone needs to hire you for their rapid response team.
yuri i can't stop laughing san is a meme
Also, I think the fact Substack spoke to Public ahead of Newton's "big meeting" says it all.
This is just deflection from the other topics they don't want to discuss. Capture of Harvard and the education industrial complex, deflect. Government funded censorship, deflect. Health policies that probably killed more people than they helped, deflect. Don't you see, its the hate speech that is causing all the problems!!
The fantastic irony that it is the captured institutions, especially main stream media and university presidents, cannot see that it is precisely their policies that have caused the lack of faith in institutions. Nope, must be the allowance of free speech. If we would all just shut up and listen, things would be great.
Also, greatly appreciated the historical context of how these laws backfire. Again, the irony is magnanimous and somehow entirely missed by those who can't use a mirror.
Didn't end up well in the 30's and 40's either....given our national tendency to 'celebrate' national disgraces by reenacting them on 100 year and 50 year anniversaries (Civil War re-do in the 1960's, Civil Rights redo 2015's) - I'd say it's going get really nasty in another 10 years when our "Anti-Fascist" protectors come to "save us"....
Maybe Katz is the notzee
Katz: ILLIBERAL neo-communist totalitarian propagandist.
Since literally anyone who challenges establishment narratives is a Nazi I am pretty sure if Substack gave in more than just a few Substacks would be gone.
Freddie DeBoer wrote about that. He's a self described Marxist, but because he doesn't go along with the party line, they'd call him a Nazi so they could get rid of him.
Yes the term “Nazi” has been thrown around so much it has lit all valuable meaning. Doesn’t mean much more than “I dislike your views” nowadays.
Absolutely. This is exactly what would happen.
It seems strange at first glance that there is so much hand wringing over such a small number of Substack newsletters with so few subscribers. I hate that I've become so cynical and suspicious, but, for the moment I'm assuming that their hope is that with so few newsletters earning so little money, the owners of Substack will cave under pressure, thinking these few are not worth the trouble. After that, their virginity will be lost. I have no doubt that, as we've seen happen elsewhere, part of the deal to have the agitators stop agitating, Substack will be pressured to hire agitator approved compliance officers.
First it will be Nazis, then other white supremacists, then people who have knowingly spoken to white supremacists, then those who spoke with them unknowingly, etc.
Next thing you know, everyone will be walking on eggshells.
Welcome, Nazi D-bags. I’ve read your shit, and all I can say is I hope at some point in your lives you find peace in the world. All 29 of you?
Substack, I greatly appreciate you sticking to your guns and defending our right to free speech. Had you not, I’m guessing you would have been left with around 200 paid subscribers.
Don't you worry, the Feds will fix that lack of Nazis problem, posthaste!!!
Just like the Feds started White Supremacist conspiracy to kidnap Gov Whitmer and seeded the J6 crowd with lots of operatives to get that Insurrection going, they'll start pushing a Nazi agenda here on Substack, to prove America has a Fascism problem.
Meanwhile, let's ignore that pedophile problem over at Instagram, or the died suddenly pandemic from the vaccines, or the open border "immigration", or the real Nazi support in Ukraine, nope, let's worry about 26 Nazis on Substack.
Christ, these propaganda bootlickers are clowns.
The “Nazi” support in Ukraine was mostly intentional Russian information
Disinformation I meant. It was part of their pretext for the invasion. Ukraine has about the same level of Nazi problem as Substack. Their president is Jewish.
Well, the guys in Azov are better armed pretty sure.
A great article. Thank you.
The ability to speak freely and express idea literally despite how bad they maybe is critical to human flourishing. As has been said many time before. Free speech only matters if you are willing to defend speech you despise. As humans created in the image of God we must be allowed to think.
"The people clamoring for Substack to restrict Nazi speech.....<show> a knee-jerk inability to cope with things they dislike. "
You are being way to generous. They are authoritarians. By their words and actions they show themselves to be Nazis. They want to destroy dissent just like any totalitarian. Their focus on Nazis is a mask designed to hide their intent.
Well said! And oh so true!!!
I've seen one Nazi on Substack but he alienates everyone, but I have seen about a thousand "anti-nazi's" acting like authoritarian's. Most of them when I point out this isn't about Nazis because they want to control Substack like Google and Meta, etc, they ban me just like they would if they controlled Substack.
It's infantile. We have almost two entire generations that ceased emotional development after the age of about 9.
The hypocrisy here is what rankles me. The same people and legacy media types who are soooo concerned with Nazi inciting violence from the written word of a tiny, tiny fraction of posts on this platform, seem to show very little concern for the many voices in major cities and U.S. college campus calling for literal genocide if the Jews. If one of the primary views of Nazism is antisemitism, why is the label not being given to the pro-Hamas protestors? Arguably, their protests would be MORE likely to incite violence than 6 newsletter with a minuscule amount of subscribers.
Omg, I just literally just commented with the same thought.
Prior to reading the comments.
Could have saved myself a few minutes and just “hearted/liked” your comment.
“Hypocrisy” right??
That’s the word I left out on my comment.
Knew I was thinking of a word...it wouldn’t come.
“Hypocrisy” that’s the word.
I just used “smelled like BS”.
lol
“Smelled like BS” works well too!
Forty years ago neo-Nazis wanted to march in Skokie, a heavily Jewish suburb of Chicago and the ACLU successfully defended their right to do so. Substack is carrying on that tradition, even if today’s ACLU isn’t. Bravo Substack..
"To say that Substack has a “Nazi problem” because of a handful of pages almost nobody reads – and the platform almost certainly barely makes any money off of – exist on the platform would be kind of like saying the 1st Amendment has a “Nazi problem” because there are a handful of white nationalists and neo-Nazis in America who have their rights to speech and assembly protected as well. "
Don't give them any ideas.
The cancelling of the First Amendment is the contemporary Leftist's "Final Solution"...and do not laugh.
That is the idea.
Presuming Substack takes 10% of 29 subscribers at $8/mo that's $278.40.
Look how cheaply these fools demand we sacrifice our natural rights to the likes of them.
Hilarious!
The "Nazi problem" is a Trojan horse. They start there, knowing that most people find those ideas aberrant, but then they use the precedent to crack down on dissent, which is the real goal. It is a feature, not a bug. Look at how the laws in Germany have been misused to prosecute CJ Hopkins for criticizing the government, even though those laws are ineffective at preventing actual antisemitism, as you note.