To the leadership of Substack—
This week, The Guardian published an investigation detailing how Substack earns revenue from newsletters that promote Nazi ideology, white supremacy, and antisemitism. The reporting showed that these publications are not only hosted on your platform, but monetized by it, and surfaced through recommendation systems that steer readers toward similar content.
Our Substack newsletter, Planet Nude, rejects fascism, Nazism, antisemitism, and white supremacy without qualification. These are not abstract ideas to be weighed in debate. They are ideologies rooted in dehumanization and violence, and their normalization online has measurable real-world consequences. We are publishing this letter openly because our readers deserve clarity, and because your decisions now directly affect the credibility and sustainability of the many publications like ours that are built on your platform.
By your own measures, Planet Nude is a Substack success. We are a Substack bestseller, a top-ranked culture publication, and a sustainable business supported by a niche audience. We publish daily, pay contributors, and operate squarely within your stated rules. We are not writing from the margins.
Planet Nude has thrived on Substack in part because of your open content policies. Our work has been restricted or erased elsewhere for lawful, nonsexual expression rooted in art, culture, and civil liberties. We have seen firsthand how blunt moderation and opaque enforcement can destroy years of work overnight. We understand why Substack positioned itself as an alternative to that model, and we value that stance.
That is why your continued monetization and amplification of explicitly Nazi and white supremacist publications presents a growing problem for us, not just ethically, but practically.
As a publisher, we answer to our readers. Increasingly, we are being asked to explain why our work lives on a platform that profits from hate ideology. That association does reputational damage whether we endorse it or not. At a certain point, the trust we have built with our audience is eroded by proxy, simply by remaining tied to infrastructure that refuses to draw basic lines.
This is not hypothetical. It affects subscriber confidence, partnerships, contributor comfort, and long-term brand integrity. No amount of editorial clarity can fully offset the reputational drag of platform association once it becomes widely understood.
For this reason, it is precisely this situation that has pushed us to begin laying groundwork for alternatives: backing up our archives, diversifying infrastructure, and exploring paths that reduce dependence on systems that profit from hate. We would prefer not to do this. Migration is costly, disruptive, and imperfect. But inaction carries its own cost, and it is one we ultimately bear.
There is a fundamental difference between protecting contested human expression and subsidizing hate ideology. Substack’s current policies collapse that distinction. Demonetizing and de-amplifying publications that explicitly promote Nazism, white supremacy, or Holocaust denial is not censorship. It is a refusal to reward belief systems built on exclusion and erasure. Algorithms and recommendation systems are active, not neutral. When extremist publications are surfaced and sustained, Substack is shaping an ecosystem and benefiting from that shape.
We understand the risk of overreach. We do not want Substack to become another platform where nuance is flattened and creators are disciplined for discomfort, ambiguity, or misunderstood expression. Nudists and naturists, in particular, know how quickly those distinctions collapse. We have experienced that failure firsthand on other platforms, and it is deeply corrosive to creative and civic work.
But caution is not the same as inaction. Substack has already shown that it can make careful distinctions—most notably in recognizing that nudity does not inherently equal sexual expression and in building space for that understanding to exist. That same capacity for judgment can and should be applied elsewhere. Platforms are not obligated to subsidize ideologies rooted in dehumanization and hate speech cannot be treated as just another form of protected expression without damaging everything around it. Platforms that refuse to act eventually narrow their own culture. If the only voices that feel fully welcome are those pushing dehumanization, others will leave silently, one by one, until the platform reflects the values it failed to challenge.
We urge Substack to adopt a common-sense approach that protects inclusive, nuanced human expression while clearly excluding ideologies rooted in hate and violence. Specifically:
Demonetize publications that explicitly promote Nazism, white supremacy, or Holocaust denial.
Remove algorithmic recommendation and amplification of extremist content.
Provide transparency about how such material is identified and handled.
These steps would help protect the ecosystem Substack depends on, preserving the kind of thoughtful, varied publications that give the platform its real diversity of ideas and made it an appealing home for creators in the first place.
Planet Nude would prefer to keep building here. But our responsibility is to our readers, our contributors, and the integrity of our work. If Substack does not change course very quickly, the cost of staying will soon have outweighed the cost of leaving, and that is not a calculation we control alone.
We are asking you to act while there is still something worth holding together.
Respectfully,
Planet Nude 🪐
Editor’s note: We’re keeping comments closed on this letter so it can stand on its own. If you’d like to share your thoughts, reactions, or experiences with platform moderation and publisher risk, we’ve opened a dedicated discussion in our #News-of-the-Nude channel on Discord.
You can join the conversation here: https://discord.gg/3u2SNS5Hqc
As always, we ask that discussion remain thoughtful, informed, and grounded in respect for one another.