Substack says it will not remove or demonetize Nazi content
mo_ztt ✅ @ mo_ztt @lemmy.world Posts 40Comments 673Joined 2 yr. ago
mo_ztt ✅ @ mo_ztt @lemmy.world
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That you broadly agree with everything you see on a website funded by Nazis, that doesn’t speak highly of you.
This thing I'm broadly agreeing with, in addition to being a viewpoint of this one article which you've managed to construct a connection back to some Nazis from, is also a viewpoint of the list of cosigners on this essay, which includes Edward Snowden and Richard Dawkins. Does that all of a sudden change your viewpoint on whether this is a valid thing for me to agree with? If, all of a sudden, some "good people" are saying it instead of some "bad people"?
I also agree with Winston Churchill on some things, even though he was a colonizing racist. I agree with some things Thomas Jefferson said, even though he was a literal slaveowner, which is arguably a much worse thing to be than an internet Nazi. Yes. I evaluate things on the merits, not on who agrees or disagrees with me. I'm not sold on the connection between "this essay" -> "the editors of Reason" -> "the Koch brothers giving it funding" -> "Nazis" meaning I'm directly agreeing with Nazis if I agree with this essay. But the big point is, I mostly just don't care who said it when evaluating whether it's true.
To me, it sounds like you're so attached to saying viewpoints are good or bad depending on the people who said them that I'm not going to talk you out of it. Best of luck with it then, I guess.
Also, I said nothing about banning speech. I have been talking about not monetizing Nazis this entire time. Do not lie and put words in my mouth.
If you're only advocating for "demonetizing," allowing the Nazis to remain on Substack but not get subscription revenue, my feeling on that is pretty much the same. The platform shouldn't be in the business of rewarding or punishing people depending on whether they agree with the viewpoint. That should be up to the person reading.
It wasn't a deliberate lie; I just assumed you wanted to ban them, but I'm happy to talk about it in terms of demonetizing instead. I apologize if I was misconstruing anything. I gave a quick stalk to your profile just now and you did say "If you do not support removing Nazis from the public sphere, you aren’t necessarily a Nazi. But you do support Nazis," which some people could construe as advocating for banning them.
Honestly? I didn't read the Reason.com article. Someone else linked to it, I skimmed it and agreed with parts of the take that I saw, and threw a link in there as sort of an expansion of what I was saying so I wouldn't have to keep typing the same types of arguments over and over. I just skimmed it again, from the beginning, and I have to say that broadly I agree with almost everything I see.
Quick work with wc indicates that I've typed about 4500 words on this topic within this post. I typed one sentence where I linked to Reason.com, and somehow out of all the thousands of words, it seems like that one sentence is all you want to talk about. I don't know how many times to say this before it sinks in, but it's a lot more valid way to discuss with me, if you want to address directly what I'm saying as opposed to pointing to a certain source and saying I'm invalid because I used that source. I can assure you that the Reason.com article had 0% to do with forming these opinions in my mind.
Additionally, I'll say that this whole model you seem to have in mind, where I read an article on Reason.com and inhaled it like a AI language model and now I'm just parroting whatever I was exposed to, and blame for anything I'm saying attaches to the article because I was powerless to resist anything wrong in it, is kind of telling as to why you want to ban Nazi speech. The thing is, people can use judgement. I do. I read stuff and I consider it critically. I might see something with a swastika and read it, and come away somehow without having become a Nazi. I might agree with something even if I find the source reprehensible personally (as I do the Koch brothers, to whatever extent they were personally involved in this article), or I might just not care what the source is, and evaluate it on its own merits. That's a good way to do it. Right? That's why I genuinely just don't care about the Reason.com article as a thing to argue about, and want to get back to discussing the facts of this actual discussion.
You missed what I'm saying. I'm not funded by Nazis. You took my message and ignored what I was saying in favor of criticizing Reason.com. Fair enough. I was inviting you to continue the conversation, if you have an argument against the content, now that I've removed anything that could be construed as "because Reason.com says so" and simply said what I think about it.
Agreed. I actually had come back to this topic specifically to make this exact point, which for all the time I'd spent on this at this point I feel like I hadn't said.
People are adults, generally speaking. It's weird to say that you can't have a newsletter that has a literal swastika on it, because people will be able to read it but unable to realize that what it's saying is dangerous violence. Apparently we have to have someone "in charge" of making sure only the good stuff is allowed to be published, and keeping away the bad stuff, so people won't be influenced by bad stuff. This is a weird viewpoint. It's one the founding fathers were not at all in agreement with.
Personally, I do think that there's a place for organized opposition to slick internet propaganda which pulls people down the right-wing rabbit hole, because that's a huge problem right now. I don't actually know what that opposition looks like, and I can definitely see a place for banning certain behaviors (bot accounts, funded troll operations, disguising the source of a message) that people might class as "free speech," or adding counterbalancing "free speech" in kind to misleading messages (Twitter's "community notes" are actually a pretty good way of combating it for example). But simply knee-jerking that we have to find the people who are wrong, and ban them, because if we let people say wrong stuff then other people will read it and become wrong, is a very childish way to look at people who consume media on the internet.
"Ad hominem" refers to ignoring the content of a message, and making your argument based on who is speaking. It doesn't mean that your statement about the speaker isn't factual, or that understanding more about who is speaking might not be relevant -- it simply refers to the idea that you should at some point address the content of the message if you're going to debate it.
In this case, I said something, you ignored the content and instead focused on the fact that I'd linked to something, and criticized the source of the thing I'd linked to. Okay, fair enough, the Koch brothers are Nazis. I don't like them either. If you want to respond to the content of my message, I've now reframed it so the stuff I'm saying is coming directly from me, so that "but Reason.com!" isn't any longer a way to dismiss it because of who is speaking.
... which is very different from "not allowing sex workers to use their service," and undermines the whole argument that "well they do do moderation, they just think Nazis are on the 'ok' list." I would have had a totally different response if the person I was responding to had tried to argue that since they don't allow actual porn, they should also be obligated to ban extreme viewpoints.
Ad hominem. Nice. That said, I get it if you think Reason.com is a sketchy source to try to point to as an argument for anything. I restructured my message, so I'm simply stating my facts and opinions directly, so you can disagree directly if you like, instead of just jeering at the "Reason.com" part of it.
If the fact that I cited "Reason.com" as an aside is a problem, but it's not a problem the person I was replying to was calmly stating something that was highly relevant to the argument that wasn't actually true... you might be only concerned with whether something agrees with your biases, not whether it's accurate. Does that not seem like a problem to you?
Hm. Fair enough. The core complaint I have with banning Nazis from being able to speak, has nothing to do with which way the money is flowing. And I fixed "your" to be "the"; I just hadn't noticed you weren't the person I was talking with before.
This might blow your mind a little bit: depilatform them. Hatespeech is hatescppech, a call to violence is a call to violence. Neither is protected by your first amendment, and both should be completely and utterly illegal.
A lot of the thinking on things like free speech by the founding fathers was that it wasn't like a "grant" of something the government is letting you do. It's an acknowledgement of some simple physical realities of what thinking beings are going to do whether you "let them" or not. Nazis are going to talk to other Nazis. If you come into their Nazi place saying "whoa whoa whoa you can't say that!", they're not going to just suddenly go, oh, my bad, you're right, we won't say that anymore. You might hate that the KKK is "allowed to exist" when their whole thing is violence, torture, basically organized evil. But, the government isn't "allowing them to exist" in the same way it might let someone have a driver's license. It's more just that people good or bad are going to do certain things, and the government is acknowledging the reality.
I would actually put some other things in this list, sex work and drugs among them. For pretty much exactly the same reasons. I think as a matter of the fundamentals of law, they should be sort of in a "can't be illegal" list, because it's so weird and invasive to people's liberty to even try.
Germany has had restriction on Nazis for a long time now. And hasn’t had issues with censoring non-nazi speech. So why can’t your country?
The US had robust protections on speech by the KKK and the American Nazi party, before during and after World War 2. In Germany, before and after the war, it's legal for the government to allow and forbid particular political parties, as they currently do with the Nazis. Fair enough. Which country was it that actually had a holocaust again? Why didn't the Nazis do it in the US, where they had such robust protections on their ability to speak and organize?
And also, if you allow for Nazi speech, how far do you take it? do you let them draw up plans and organise gangs to hunt down undesirables? Only intervening when the physical violence actually starts?
If you do not work to prevent atrocities, and turn a blind eye to those trying to commit them then you are in fact tacitly complicit in those atrocities.
So you can punish speech advocating for violence. It's a tricky thing, because people will just speak in code, which is now happening all over the place. (I see that on Facebook -- people will say, I can't really say what I want to have happen, but we all know what the answer is. Things like that.) But yes, if someone says we have to kill the Jews, I think that should be illegal, whether or not they're a Nazi. Talking to an associate to plan a robbery is illegal, publishing a newsletter planning a new holocaust is illegal. Saying the holocaust is a lie, I think should be legal. Saying Hitler was right, I think should be legal. That's where I would draw the line.
It sounds -- tell me if I'm wrong -- like you think that I just don't care about hate speech, or I don't see why it might be a problem, or it's not worth worrying about. Absolutely it's a problem. On all this urgency you're expressing, I 100% agree with you. I am saying that banning it makes that problem worse. Basically, my opposition to banning hate speech is because I don't want it to "win." The original internet (like Usenet era), the one I talked about way up there in my original comment, didn't have anywhere near the level of embittered extremism that we see now. I think that's because everyone was on the same network. Someone could go on and say "Hitler was right" and people pile on to tell that person why they were wrong. But you could say whatever you wanted. It's like people who go to college and get less racist because they're thrown into this big multicultural situation. There will still be racist people, yes. But things will be much worse, and people will be a lot less honest with you about their racist views, if the instant some person says something racist the college administation tells them they're not welcome on campus anymore and they have to find a new society to be a part of that isn't so multicultural. They get isolated and fester and find like-minded people to fester with. Which is what's happening now on the internet.
I am sorry for talking so long; this is just important to me. The one last thing I'll say -- one main reason I'm so concerned about this is that I have a feeling that it won't stop at Nazis; that as soon as Nazis are deplatformed they'll start coming for the Joe Rogans and the Dave Chappelles on Substack, someone who is far from calling from a holocaust, but just has said something that someone decided isn't allowed. Literal Nazis tend to call for genuine crimes, and tend to not attract as many followers as the kill-the-Democrats-oho-I-didn't-mean-it-literally-wink crowd, so they're easier to deal with. My main concerns are, please don't try to censor the non-Nazis, and please what the fuck do we do about the new brand of extremists. I can't literally agree with you that we should deplatform all my Facebook friends who call for violence in coded ways. I won't claim to know what's the right thing to do about this new type of propaganda but that doesn't seem like the answer.
Still 100% possible. Wordpress hosting is cheap and easy. It's getting harder and harder for that type of site to find a good audience, as the web becomes more and more siloed and the stuff within the silos becomes more tightly interconnected, but some notable people are still doing it. Cory Doctorow comes to mind.
Where out of my message did you get that I was talking like it was harmless opinions? I get it that my tone was casual and I can apologize about that. Let me take it a little more seriously, then:
Let me guess, you’re not the kind of person that the Nazis are extremely keen on putting in a gas chamber?
Because you’re talking like this is just harmless, but unpopular opinions people have. Not a group of people who by definition think they are the master race and people who are “impure” need to be genocides.
I have a decent amount of Jewish ancestry and a Jewish name. I'm not practicing or anything. My parents had a friend who had the numbers tattooed on her arm.
Part of the reason I'm so casual about literal modern Nazis is that the modern threat of extremism isn't specific to Jewish people. Hispanic people are probably more at risk; under Trump, ICE detention centers became temporarily something that any informed person would describe as for-real concentration camps. I think if it does start to happen in a big way in the US, it will probably start with trans and Hispanic people and continue from there.
But every single one of us, Jewish or LGBT or Hispanic or just Democrat-supporting, is at risk under a second Trump presidency or whatever the next iteration after Trump is. That's not some abstract "I know your struggle" type of statement; I literally believe that Nazi-type violence and mass incarceration of "the enemy" are on the table according to a much wider swathe of the US populace than official-Nazi supporters.
And honestly I can’t fucking stand spineless cunts like you that think we can’t draw a reasonable line between Nazis calling for the end of entire races and for one of the worst atrocities in thr history of mankind to happen again, and Naom Chomsky. Putting “wrong” in quotation marks as if thinking genocidal racists being wrong is just a matter of opinion. And you have such little regard for the people that suffer at the hand of these scumbags that you think you can play devil’s advocate as a fun little excessive for yourself.
Okay, let me ask you, then. I have Facebook friends who make posts about getting themselves amped up for civil war if "the Democrats" keep it up. I would describe that as an atrocity. Dead is dead. A Jew in a concentration camp is just as dead as a Democrat who got shot by his neighbor because they got radicalized and decided today was the day (which has already happened, it's just on a tiny scale at this stage).
Most of the way I talk about this issue is colored by that. I do take the threat of extremism seriously, because it's already alive and well here, and growing. I think that figuring out what to do about the form in which it's most likely to become a horrifying reality is fairly important. If Jews wind up going into modern-day concentration camps, they won't be the first. They'll be an afterthought, long after Trump's political enemies and big segments of Hispanic (and maybe arab) people have gone in. If you're serious about the threat to Jewish people and want me to take it seriously (which is fair), can I ask you to be serious about the threat to all the rest of us?
What is your solution to the people who want to write "shoot the Democrats because they stole the election and took away your country"? People who say that every day and platforms that give them voice? My feeling on it is the same as what I said to you about Nazis. But what, according to you, should we do that will work? I am more concerned about that, as a present-day urgent issue, than about "put the Jews into gas chambers" propaganda, although that's clearly also horrifying.
How is it pedantic to point out that "will pay for them" means "will get paid by them"?
There's a perfectly good argument to be made that Substack shouldn't host Nazis even if they're making money off them. But that wasn't (edit: your the) message; your the message was, they're hiring Nazis. It's relevant whether they're materially supporting the Nazis, or being materially supported by a cut of their revenue.
Simply put propaganda works.
"Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate.” -Thomas Jefferson
Professionally produced and packaged propaganda to sway public opinion is absolutely a critical modern problem. I won't say I have the solution. I can tell you from experience interacting with people who have been victimized by propaganda that they will happily follow the propaganda-sources off the "responsible" content networks who are censoring them and onto some other network that's still willing to host them.
Put it another way: Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube all have policies designed to combat the spread of election denial and COVID denialism, by limiting people's ability to post it on their networks. How's that worked?
I don’t think you have ever been a person on the receiving side of hate where a group of people want you to cease to exist, to take your rights away, or to torture you.
If you're intending this as some sort of trump card, where you're allowed to have an opinion on the matter and I'm not (when you have no idea what I have or haven't been on the receiving end of), then don't respond to this message and we can go our separate ways. If you're interested in talking with me about it, then I'm happy to do that, and take what you say on your own merits and not come up with external reasons to dismiss it.
(Edit, since I just saw it in another comment: If you're real into certain people being allowed to express their views when other people aren't, here's Edward Snowden, among other people, telling you that you're wrong. Has he had a group of people want to take his rights away? They did promise not to torture him but I'm not sure that was a truthful statement.)
In our modern world if you spread intolerance you are shunned and deplatformed. That is a big improvement compared to the past.
Oh, good. So intolerance's spread on the internet is getting progressively smaller over time, is it? Thank God, it seemed for a while like that was a problem.
This whole freedom of speech movement is a red hearing for hate speech and you bought into it trying to be reasonable.
Sometimes, yes. There are a bunch of conservative people in the US who use "free speech" in a very particular way as a red herring for something much different and much darker. Why do you assume that I've been swayed by them? I spent some time yesterday and today arguing with one of them, I actually got annoyed that he didn't seem to want to engage with me when I was eager to tell him about how he was wrong.
I notice, also, that you haven't spent too much time responding to what I actually said; you told me a bunch of things about me, and reasons why my views can be discounted. Like I say, if that's the way then we don't need to talk.
There is no reasoning with them and you are simply wrong.
Welp. Glad we cleared that up.
Let’s take the Web out of the equation.
Happy to.
Let’s imagine this is all being done using the old-school printing press.
With you so far.
Let’s say Substack is a magazine publisher.
Sounds good. The situation's a little different because the publisher exercises editorial control over what they're publishing, can get sued if it crosses certain lines, and so on, whereas literally any random person can publish stuff on Substack with some legal and technical differences. But it's a pretty close analogy.
If you publish a Nazi magazine, that Nazis pay you to subscribe to …
With you.
… and you pay the Nazi authors of the Nazi articles in your Nazi magazine …
This is where it breaks down for me. This would be something like Substack Pro, where Substack really is subsidizing and organizing the make the Nazi content happen, instead of just hosting it like a Lemmy instance hosts a community. If they were giving Substack Pro to Nazis, then yes, I'd have a problem with that. That would fit very well with what you're describing.
I would describe this part of the analogy as applying a little more sensibly to something like, Substack is the print shop that typesets the material for the Nazi magazine on behalf of the Nazi that wants to publish it. The Nazi is organizing their subscribers. The Nazi is putting out the content. The print shop is taking a cut, and willing to do business with Nazis. Are they free to say no? Absolutely. Actually in that analogy I'd probably refuse to typeset the magazine as well, for what it's worth. Are they also free, though, to say, no, this is a free speech issue and we believe the KKK is allowed to have rallies and the Nazis are allowed to publish magazines? Sure. That to me would be a sensible thing to say. I don't like Nazis any more than you do. But I do think they should be allowed to publish magazines, yes, and I think that applies to making it actually possible for them to publish, and not just the government telling them they have permission, but the system they're placed within making it impossible for it to actually happen.
… then you’re a material supporter of Nazism.
In financial flow terms, the Nazi subscribers are supporting Substack through the 10% cut that Substack takes. No money is flowing out of the Substack account to the Nazis without having first flowed in from other Nazis, and Substack keeps some of it. Right? That's why I think the print shop analogy is a little more fitting in this case.
Not exactly. Substack subscribers pay subscription fees, the content author keeps roughly 80% of the fees, and the rest goes to Substack or to offset hosting costs. The Nazi subscribers are paying the Nazi publishers, and money is flowing from the Nazi subscribers to Substack because of that operation (not away from Substack as it would be if they hired Nazis).
Do they not allow sex workers to use their service? Here's a sex worker who posts on Substack.
I believe keeping the ability for sex workers to post there intact is a good reason not to ban Nazis -- basically, deciding who are "good" posters and allowing only them leads to a steadily-expanding list of "bad" categories of people who need to get banned, with sex workers as an obvious additional early target.
If you're open to reading an article from Reason.com expanding on this take, which I partially agree with, there it is.
(Edit: Restructured so that more of the argument comes directly from me, as opposed to Reason.com)
Almost as if Radley Balko's publisher deciding whether he was allowed to continue to speak anymore was a bad thing, and giving him a place where he can do it and earn a living and no one polices his content was a good thing.
(Edit: Woo hoo hoo judging by the downvotes y'all sure don't like it when it happens to one of your guys. Just to be clear, I don't really care all that much what happens to the literal Nazis. I only care a lot about this issue because I suspect that once you're done kicking off Nazis, you'll want to kick off the Joe Rogans and the Dave Chappelles and the COVID denialists and sooner or later some person will arrive with a list on which is someone you like. Like Radley Balko. And yet, somehow, that'll be totally different in your mind, not connected at all with the earlier people you were advocating for banning.)
I don't really understand Substack or fully grasp the issues involved; I'm just gonna say how I see it. I looked over their monetization page, and it kind of looks like the way it works is that the Nazi's readers (other Nazis, presumably) can sign up for a subscription, and Substack I assume takes a cut, and the rest goes to the Nazi. So it kind of sounds like the Nazis are paying each other, with a cut of that going to Substack. Do I have that right? It sounds like the Nazis (in the aggregate) are paying Substack. Nobody at Substack is raising money and using it to subsidize any Nazis. The Nazis are subsidizing hosting for random other publishers who don't have subscriptions. I think.
Irregardless of all that, I just have this general dislike of "demonitization" and the modern ethos of publishing on the internet. The demonitization on Youtube is totally weird. You can't say "suicide" or refer to sexual abuse or have gunshot sounds or say "fuck" in the first thirty seconds, except sometimes you can, and some content which is clearly harmful is allowed, and other stuff gets randomly taken away. Everyone lives under the constant threat of saying the wrong thing and suddenly getting, essentially, fired. One extremely popular Youtuber I liked left because he couldn't say what he wanted. John Stewart got "demonetized" from Apple+ just recently because he said something about China. The whole thing is stupid. Just let people say stuff. If it's illegal, take it down and prosecute them. If it's not, then let them say it. Yes I know the letter of the first amendment only applies to the government. I'm just saying I like the spirit, too. This culture's developed of policing what people can and can't say to a degree I find really off putting.
I get how we got here. You don't want people saying not to take the COVID vaccine or that the election was stolen, and producing real harm in the real world. But the landscape we've wound up at is stupid. Just let people be Nazis if they're Nazis. They're going to be Nazis, whether you allow them to or not. In fact, letting them participate in an open forum of ideas makes it more likely that they'll reform than chasing them away to a Nazi-only forum. If they're being toxic to other users, or doing something illegal in addition (which, to be fair, Nazis often are), then prosecute them for that behavior, not for being Nazis.
One of the really earthshattering moments for me on the early internet was reading posts from people who were "the enemy" in a shooting war that at the time I thought my country was "the good guys" of. It really blew my mind once I realized that Hamas is allowed to be on the internet, and North Korea, and Israel and The Daily Stormer and Hugo Chavez and Noam Chomsky. They're all allowed to have their web site. The modern internet is becoming more and more siloed, so that "I'm allowed to run a web server if I want" is less and less a determiner of whether that culture can continue. For better or worse, we're more than a little dependent now on whether big corporations who run the infrastructure want to let that chaotic "the bad guys are allowed to be here too" nature continue. They don't seem like they want to, and I don't like that.
Again, maybe this is an unpopular view, but that's how I see it.
Honestly? Unless I'm missing something, this sounds fine.
The internet I grew up on had Nazis, racists, Art Bell, UFO people, software pirates, and pornographers. The ACLU defended KKK rallies. Some of the people who were allowed a platform, that "everyone hated" and a lot of people wanted to censor, were people like Noam Chomsky who I liked hearing from.
I think there's a difference between "moderation" meaning "we're going to prevent Nazis from ruining our platform for people who don't want to hear from them" -- which, to me, sounds fine and in fact necessary in the current political climate -- and "moderation" meaning "if you hold the wrong sort of views you're not allowed to express them on my platform." The Nazi bar analogy, and defederating with toxic Lemmy instances, refers to the first situation. If I understand Substack's platform properly, it's the second: Only the people who want to follow the Nazis can see the Nazis. No? Am I wrong in that?
I'm fully in agreement with McKenzie that not allowing "wrong" views to be expressed and legitimately debated makes it harder to combat them, not easier. They're not gonna just evaporate because "everyone agrees they're bad" except the people who don't.
I realize this is probably a pretty unpopular view.
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.
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.