Substack, the popular newsletter platform, recently sent out a push alert for a Nazi-themed newsletter. The publication in question, NatSocToday, describes itself as a “National Socialist weekly newsletter featuring opinions and news important to the National Socialist and White Nationalist Community.” The newsletter’s image header is a Nazi flag, and its latest post, as of Wednesday, was an article that includes the sentence: “We demand the return of all territory currently occupied by jews and non-Whites in historically White homelands.” It does not appear to be a particularly popular blog, and currently has fewer than a thousand subscribers. User Mag, a newsletter on Substack started by Taylor Lorenz, first reported that a push alert for the publication “was sent to an undisclosed number of users’ phones on Monday.” Some of those people who reportedly received the push alert subsequently posted about it online, expressing confusion over “why they were being prompted to subscribe to a Nazi blog,” the outlet writes.
via gizmodo: Substack Sends Push Alert for Nazi Newsletter
siehe auch: Substack’s “Nazi problem” won’t go away after push notification apology Substack may be legitimizing neo-Nazis as “thought leaders,” researcher warns. After Substack shocked an unknown number of users by sending a push notification on Monday to check out a Nazi blog featuring a swastika icon, the company quickly apologized for the “error,” tech columnist Taylor Lorenz reported. “We discovered an error that caused some people to receive push notifications they should never have received,” Substack’s statement said. “In some cases, these notifications were extremely offensive or disturbing. This was a serious error, and we apologize for the distress it caused. We have taken the relevant system offline, diagnosed the issue, and are making changes to ensure it doesn’t happen again.” Substack has long faced backlash for allowing users to share their “extreme views” on the platform, previously claiming that “censorship (including through demonetizing publications)” doesn’t make “the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse,” Lorenz noted. But critics who have slammed Substack’s rationale revived their concerns this week, with some accusing Substack of promoting extreme content through features like their push alerts and “rising” lists, which flag popular newsletters and currently also include Nazi blogs. Joshua Fisher-Birch, a terrorism analyst at a nonprofit non-government organization called the Counter Extremism Project, has been closely monitoring Substack’s increasingly significant role in helping far-right movements spread propaganda online for years. He’s calling for more transparency and changes on the platform following the latest scandal. In January, Fisher-Birch warned that neo-Nazi groups saw Donald Trump’s election “as a mix of positives and negatives but overall as an opportunity to enlarge their movement.” Since then, he’s documented at least one Telegram channel—which currently has over 12,500 subscribers and is affiliated with the white supremacist Active Club movement—launch an effort to expand their audience by creating accounts on Substack, TikTok, and X. Of those accounts created in February, only the Substack account is still online, which Fisher-Birch suggested likely sends a message to Nazi groups that their Substack content is “less likely to be removed than other platforms.” At least one Terrorgram-adjacent white supremacist account that Fisher-Birch found in March 2024 confirmed that Substack was viewed as a back-up to Telegram because it was that much more reliable to post content there.