Hate Sells. That's Why I'm Leaving Substack.
Why privilege enables you to sit on the sidelines.
On Saturday evening, I came across a video that genuinely unsettled me.
It was a 2023 interview where journalist Nilay Patel pressed Substack CEO Chris Best with a deceptively simple question: If somebody shows up on Substack and says all brown people are animals and they shouldn’t be allowed in America, you’re going to censor that (right)?
Chris Best’s response: “So we do have a TOS that has narrowly prescribed, uh, things that are not allowed.”
That’s it. The whole exchange is painful to watch. Kudos to Nilay Patel for standing his ground.
That video sent me down a rabbit hole. Turns out, Substack has had a documented Nazi newsletter problem since 2023, from newsletters using overt Nazi symbols and trafficking in Great Replacement theory.
A timeline worth knowing
n November 2023, journalist Jonathan Katz published a piece in The Atlantic titled “Substack Has a Nazi Problem.” It documented newsletters openly using swastikas and promoting white supremacist ideology. Within weeks, nearly 250 Substack writers signed a collective protest letter questioning why leadership chose to promote and allow the monetization of white nationalist sites while still moderating spam and pornography.
Co-founder Hamish McKenzie’s official response, issued on December 21, 2023, was that Substack would continue to platform and monetize Nazi newsletters because “censorship makes the problem worse” and “open discourse” is the most effective way to “strip bad ideas of their power.” Several prominent writers left the platform in protest. Others defended the decision as a necessary commitment to free expression.
This is the statement they made:
Statement from Substack management - Reddit
In early 2024, after mounting backlash, Substack removed five publications that endorsed Nazi ideology, but explicitly stated they would not change their content policies and would not proactively search for or remove neo-Nazi or far-right extremist content. Co-founder McKenzie minimized the impact of those removals, noting the accounts had no paid subscribers and a combined total of roughly 100 active readers. The message was clear: this was optics management, not a values shift.
By June 2024, nearly 40 fascist, white supremacist, or far-right publications were identified to be still operating and actively monetizing on the platform. Far-right authors had simply learned to use Substack’s own terms of service as a guide, rebranding their rhetoric to avoid explicit calls for violence, while continuing to use Substack’s payment and recommendation infrastructure to grow their movements.
Where Substack stands today
In January this year, Substack banned several accounts that were against its policy (mainly those that were creating fake paid subscriptions to boost their ranking on the best seller boards.)
Source: Chris Best Substack
Substack continues to stand against those that trample the freedom of speech and expression tenets. This was their statement when journalists were arrested in January:
Source: Substack
Source: Chris Best's Substack
But despite that the hate continues. In Feb 2026, a coalition of women and LGBTQ+ writers released an open letter documenting what they called a "systemic failure" to protect them from abuse including rape threats, racial slurs, and deepfake pornography threats flooding their inboxes and comment sections. Trolls were easily creating new accounts to circumvent blocks. Substack's reporting systems were described as fundamentally broken. UK MP Joani Reid announced plans to contact Substack, stating that antisemitism and gendered violence were "spreading with impunity" on the platform.
Why I am a hypocrite
I am writing this piece on Substack. I am fully aware of the irony. Moreover, I am still on Meta channels (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) despite them also dialing back their policing on hate speech.
Meta announced last year that it is abandoning independent fact-checkers in the U.S., replacing them with a “Community Notes” model, and has lifted restrictions on topics like immigration and gender identity, framing this as undoing “mission creep” in its moderation systems.
So yes, I am a hypocrite. But I stay on Meta for a purely personal reason: living far from friends and family, it’s my primary way to stay connected to them. Even though I barely use Facebook or Instagram, I have not yet left it. The stakes of leaving are higher, and I am honest enough to admit that.
My footprint on Substack is much smaller, making it easier to leave with much lower stakes. This same logic is why I never started on X or engaged with Grok, I simply do not want to begin building on a platform that does not believe in moderating opinions that cause hate, instigation of violence, or the belief that one class of people is superior to another.
Why I am leaving
Let’s be honest. I am a small guppy in this pond. I have a mere 200 subscribers and it doesn’t matter whether I stay or go. But I feel deeply uncomfortable being part of a system where a privileged tech bros allow for harmful content to exist without any real pushback.
Hate is such a powerful emotion that causes adverse actions and real harm. Whether that is hate against brown people or Jews or Palestinians or LGBTQ+ or women or even the denial of the Holocaust, hate causes real harm. Not taking a stance against it allows the hate to exist.
I find it difficult to justify staying on a platform that is okay propagating it. Hate in most cases is directed at minorities. Hate is mostly about punching down. And that is not freedom of speech or expression rather weaponization of a platform.
Where does the line lie between freedom of speech and the ability to cause harm to people, and what role do content platforms play in this? Substack claims “we let the readers decide what they want to read,” but at the same time, they’re quite comfortable making money off newsletters that advocate or apologize for genocide and violence.
I do agree on the tenet that freedom of expression is either absolute or it doesn’t exist at all. But just like our freedom of expression doesn’t allow us to murder someone, doesn’t allow us to use physical violence — why do we allow the propagation of violent ideals? Why is punching down acceptable in a society where it could eventually lead to violent action?
No atrocity in history started with someone immediately deciding to expel violence on another person. It started with the ideals. It started with the belief that they were superior, that they were in the right. This belief was then propagated across echo chambers until those ideals became actions.
For me, the difference between Substack and other flawed platforms really lies in the ability to acknowledge that there is a challenge. If the CEO doesn’t even want to acknowledge that this is a problem, that’s the core of the issue. And for me, that’s not good enough.
There are two ways to fight hate: engage in dialogue and educate, or walk away. The problem with dialogue is that the people peddling hate are seldom willing to hear another point of view. Given the current political climate and the destruction we are watching unfold in the world, it feels hollow to continue on a platform whose key priority is protecting the right to express over human life and harm.
So I am walking away.
If you are a subscriber at the time of writing this, you have already been added to my list at Beehiiv. I have met some wonderful people on Substack and made great connections, and I would love to take you with me. If you would still like to join feel free to subscribe here.