Troll Hunter
A journey through the Substack dungeons in search of Hate Speech
As the Great Substack Moderation Wars continue, I have asked on several occasions for examples of “hate speech” that required moderation. To date, I have received no response to those queries.
It is not up to marginalized and oppressed people to do anti-racism work for me, or so I’ve been told. So I decided to see what I could find lurking in the dungeons of Substack with the help of my trusty Palantir (OK, I did a few Google searches).
Trigger warning: these searches involve offensive slurs. I have not censored the shocking words. If Substack is to be moderated, let the decision be made on the basis of unaltered and unexpurgated evidence.
The first entry we find on this search is a Substack review of Larry Mitchell’s 1977 queer fantasy book, The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions. The author of that post, Ellie, is “a trans, neurodivergent lesbian currently studying for an MA in gender and queer studies in the UK.”
A significant percentage of the entries involved reports of people using the word “faggot” in a pejorative context. Golfer Justin Thomas’ famous slip-up on the green came up several times, and the final entry, from Father Ted creator Graham Linehan, documents a trans activist calling an elderly Stonewall veteran a “faggot.”
Many others involved LGBT people who were talking about being called “faggot” on different occasions, frequently in childhood and often by one parent or the other. Others involved people reclaiming the word as a self-descriptor.
The most controversial entry I could find was this piece from Slanderman’s Super Special Slandering Station, which postulates that toxic chemicals and fluoridated water is the reason why so many people have begun identifying as LGBT.
I’m not sure I see anything here that warrants moderation, though I would gladly listen to any arguments as to why any of these posts are so hateful and harmful that they should be removed from Substack rather than ignored.
The second level of our dungeon holds more troll booty. My Palantir does not distinguish between the ethnic slur and the common Spanish nickname Kiké (short for Enrique) so we wound up with a lot of fake gold doubloons. But there was certainly some … treasure? … to be found.
The first relevant entry discusses the ways different editors of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby have dealt with a line from a woman who says she “almost married a little kyke who’d been after me for years.” This one has genuine artistic merit — the author discusses various editions and adaptations and is talking about a subject of interest to Fitzgerald scholars and those interested in 20th Century American literature. And even if it didn’t, there is nothing in here that encourages violence or any sort of ill feeling against Jews.
Yasha Levine’s work has a provocative title, but perhaps his most controversial statement is that there was no organized plan by Stalin to starve out Ukrainian kulaks when there clearly was. As he puts it, in a statement that I would classify as genocide denial even if I would not censor it, the Holodomor story
allowed Ukrainian nationalist emigres to whitewash their own genocidal history, all while also defensively justifying this history. “Hey, man. The Jews genocided us first!”
But whatever your feelings about the Holodomor, this entry was written by a Jewish author who was quoting anti-Semitic propaganda. And, as you may have guessed by now, I think it is entirely reasonable to provide concrete evidence when you are making claims of bigotry and hate speech.
When we come to the comments on Ari Melber’s “Trump Indicted,” we find our old friend Clarence Wilhelm Spangle offering his words of wisdom:
Fuck you and your Jewish god, you filthy fucking kike bitch . . .
PROTOCOLS OF THE MEETINGS OF THE LEARNED ELDERS OF ZION...
Protocol No. 18 – Arrest of Opponents
“Criminals with us will be arrested at the first, more or less, well-grounded suspicion: it cannot be allowed that out of fear of a possible mistake an opportunity should be given of escape to persons suspected of a political lapse of crime, for in these matters we shall be literally merciless.”
Spangle posted several comments like this on Ari Melber’s blog entry. I would have muted and blocked him after the first one, but that is Melber’s decision to make. Every Substack creator gets to decide the rules of engagement on their page, and every creator has the power to mute and block commenters they find problematic.
Surprisingly, Spangle’s comments were the only result I could find of somebody using “kike” as an ethnic slur on Substack. I found several personal accounts of Jews talking about times they were called “kike” and a couple more entries quoting anti-Semitic material. But the use of “kike” as a personal attack seems to be quite rare on Substack and may even be confined to a sole commentator.
Now that we’ve examined the dungeon, let’s take a look in the sewer.
The first entry on our list comes from Columbia University professor John McWhorter, a Linguistics professor with a specialty in Creole languages:
In this piece, McWhorter discusses cases where academics have been censured or even fired for quoting the word “nigger” He gives the example of a New School literature professor who was attacked for telling her class that the 2016 James Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro misquoted what Baldwin actually said, followed by several others. And he notes that while it is clear that these statements were not intended to cause offense, the complainants nevertheless insisted they felt unsafe and offended:
I call this refusal performative – i.e. a put-on – because I simply cannot believe that so many people do not see the difference between using a word as a weapon and referring to the word in the abstract. I would be disrespecting them to suppose that they don’t get this difference between, say, Fuck! as something yelled and fuck as in a word referring to sexual intercourse. They understand the difference, but see some larger value in pretending that it doesn’t exist.
Other entries describe historical events like the Tulsa race riots or sundown towns, as well as Eugene Robinson’s beautifully-written personal account of being called A Nigger. Six Times.
Once again we find the Substacks where this word is used are either dealing with historical events, personal recollections, or discussions about its impact. I’m not seeing any Substack entries that would even remotely qualify as hate speech. To discover the racist troll, we must go to the comments.
On April 23, 2020, Max Lowenthal wrote an article about stereotypes in modern video games. On June 17, 2022 reader nigger01 offered his thoughts:
this article is full of nigger sjw who will kill themselves because of their hrt and because they have cut their dick off. kill yourself im arab and will not be offended by this. being offended when you are not even the target of that thing is fucking stupid. its like laughing and having fun with a blind guy by making jokes about being blind and a random woman in background says i shouldnt say that. the blind guy told her to fuck off
And on June 2, 2020, Steven Underwood wrote an article about the racist website ChimpMania, only to receive a barrage of comments from ChimpMania regulars like nigger hater, lynch niggers, and niggers go fyrslf.
In this instance, I can absolutely understand why Underwood left the comments intact. ChimpMania’s readership provided abundant evidence that they were everything he said they were.
The final results of our dungeon dig:
One Substack author yelling that all these chemicals in the water are making the freakin’ faggots gay.
One author whose Substack site features anti-Semitic and racist material and who makes anti-Semitic comments to other Substack creators.
A racist comment flood against a Black man who wrote about a racist website.
A comment from an angry gamer that used the notorious n-word and suggested the author kill himself like a tranny.
I do not know how many Substack creators have deleted racist comments rather than giving the trolls further attention and would welcome any further information from people who have actually experienced this kind of behavior firsthand. But so far it appears that very few Substack writers are engaging in the loudest and most controversial forms of intolerance. And that its comments contain no more overt trolling and racism than you would find on most political websites.
This is not a scientific survey, and I am open to evidence from parties on all sides. But as of now, I’ve seen nothing to suggest that Substack is in need of widespread moderation. Nor have I seen a plan that would not result in shutting down a lot of useful and productive discourse in the name of shutting down a very few obnoxious and easily avoided pests.
Thanks for this post. As a non-American I find this hysteria over words very puzzling and maybe a tad concerning. I hope it passes somehow.
It's weird, but in my country we do have racial problems, but we're not as obsessed about policing people's language as in America. We have strict laws governing what we can say, however. It is problematic - "language that provokes racial tensions" is a really vague rule - but as a result we've learned how to talk in a careful way that doesn't incite anger. I think most Americans would find this level of self-censorship horrifying, but sometimes I wonder if it's actually beneficial to civic discourse in my country.