Substack, the platform I have used (up until now) to communicate with my email subscribers, seems to have been profiting from White Supremacy posts, self-proclaimed Nazis, some with over 10,000 paid subscribers (a percentage of their subscriptions goes toward paying Substack’s bills).
I will no doubt be leaving them and concentrating on another platform — perhaps this one (Wix), or Medium, where I've had a presence for years now. We’ll see. Everyone has their issues and I have much research to do.
My questions are:
How do I know that my next platform of choice isn’t supporting the same voices? I’m pretty sure Wix and Medium don't put up with this, but how can I be sure? I only found out about Substack’s problems because I follow Margaret Atwood on Substack (see her informative, sobering post below). Not sure how to verify this stuff, but it must be true because even The Atlantic did a piece on it.
I already left Twitter over Elon Musk and the 'free speech' going on there. If I leave Substack, too, then wouldn't I be abandoning my responsibility to keep speaking up for the world I want to live in? If I left — or, if all of us who disagreed with White Supremacy left Substack — yes, it would send a message to those running Substack. But wouldn’t that also give their offending members a better chance to accumulate, concentrate, foment, and grow more powerful?
And also (this is a much bigger conversation about a whole different issue, but), the propensity we all have of just hunkering down with the people we agree with seems counterproductive to me. I listen to NPR because I trust what they're telling me. There are millions who listen to Fox News because they believe what they're telling them. We all think we know the truth and we've lost the art of discussion, of real debate, of respectful disagreement. Don't know what to do about this one. And yeah, I know that window went by a long time ago, but I just thought I'd mention it because I think it's a big part of what got us into this mess.
One of Noam Chomsky's most seminal works (co-written with Edward S. Herman), Manufacturing Consent: the Political Economy of the Mass Media, helps us understand how the We the People are manipulated. That, combined with the presence of AI, makes me distrustful of everything I read or see on the media. How do I know that even the whole “Substack is supporting Nazis” thing isn’t the work of some other group that wants to take down that platform for some nefarious reason?
Does it matter either way? If I stay, don't I still have my voice? My voice is not usually political--it’s more in the Buddhist realm of things. But if I leave, wouldn't I still have my voice, using it elsewhere? And let's face it--won’t there always be a Kill Them All faction of the world raging against the enemy-du-jour?
Why not just stay put and keep writing?
BUT. I can make an argument for either staying or leaving Substack. Please weigh in. I want to know what my readers think about this. It’s important. And thank you for taking seriously what we need to think about and DO, right now. This is no joke.
Here is the aforementioned, extremely important post by Margaret Atwood. Read it to its end. It’s an eye-opener. And again, let me know what you think.