Thread by @sh0p1fyj03

Shopify doesn’t “arm the rebels”. It crushes them.

The writing has been on the wall since 2016. Shopify is spiraling out of control. The company’s dalliances with hateful and domestic terror accounts are a window into a company that

is struggling to support small and mid-size businesses and sewing division and disaster both internally and globally. And at the heart of it all is one man: CEO and founder Tobi Lutke.

Riding roughshod over his employees, encouraging hate on his platform, disdainful of regulators and customers, Tobi is spelling disaster for Shopify. We're going to outline a pattern of behaviour symptomatic of Tobi’s barely concealed megalomania 👇

1. No noose is good news: The first alarm bells started ringing about a year after George Floyd was murdered, when the diversity and racial justice Slack channel lit up with a shocking new development: someone had added a noose emoji to Slack.

2. As a remote-first company, Slack was the primary tool for communicating at work. There is no ambiguity to this. The noose is a symbol of terror and violence targeting Black Americans.

3. The sensitivity of the issue was all the more acute given that just a few months before, a police officer had knelt on the neck of a black man, suffocating him to death as he cried for his mother.

4. CEO Tobi Lutke’s response was to shut down the Slack channel. He did so with a chilling threat directed not at the creator of the noose — but at the Black employees that dared to protest the presence of a noose in their workplace:

5. Employees who “engage in endless Slack trolling, victimhood thinking, us-vs-them divisiveness, and zero-sum thinking must be seen for the threat they are,” he wrote in a memo.

6. To hear Tobi describe his upset black employees as a threat to the company was deeply unsettling. All the messages of support he’d issued in the wake of the Floyd murder now felt like meaningless platitudes as it became clear that

7. Tobi’s “support” and “empathy” for black and minority groups (even his own employees) extended only as far as it didn't interfere with his profits.

8. Breitbart
A few years previous in 2017, it was revealed that Shopify was hosting the white nationalist site, Breitbart. At the time, Tobi defended their decision to keep the store on the platform:

9. “When we kick off a merchant, we’re asserting our own moral code as the superior one. But who gets to define that moral code?”

10. Here, in plain writing, was Tobi Lutke telling the world that he could not discern between “right” and “wrong”. It was incredible to read a CEO believe that morality is merely a matter of opinion, and

11. that a neo-Nazi or white supremacist opinion was as deserving of an audience as any other — so long as they were making money.

12. Incredulity quickly hardened to horror when Tobi, apparently not content with simply being the platform that sits passive and does not act in the face of fascists, actually went so far as to suggest that it is Shopify’s duty to protect racists who want to make money:

13. “We don’t like Breitbart, but products are speech and we are pro-free speech. This means protecting the right of organizations to use our platform even if they are unpopular or if we disagree with their premise, as long as they are within the law,” he said.

14. The “it’s business, it’s not personal” line being used by Tobi here is especially popular with the Mafia, but compelled some staff to quit, with one employee Tessa Thornton sharing her resignation letter publicly.
medium.com/@tessthornton/…

15. Libs of TikTok
A few years later, in July 2022, the revelation that another extremist brand was using Shopify to fund itself and spread its hateful message sent ripples of disgust through employees at Shopify.

16. If you’re unfamiliar with the Libs of Tiktok account run by Chaya Raichik: she’s a transphobic influencer driving a groomer conspiracy about the Trans community. Her brand’s raison d’être is to target and incite hatred toward the LGBTQIA+ community,

17. and has been largely successful given the rise in violence inflicted on that community, especially Trans members. insider.com/live-news-upda…

18. But why was Shopify defending the indefensible?
The answer, according to @nandoodles of @CheckMyAdsHQ, lay with Tobi’s new Chief Operations Officer Kaz Nejatian who was personally intervening to keep stores like this on the platform.

https://twitter.com/nandoodles/status/1596271991694278656?s=20

19. The mention of Nejatian seemed to strike a nerve with Tobi, who until then had remained largely silent. In his reply to Nandini he said “Shopify has a published AUP and a principled process to apply it. Pressure groups on all sides try to influence it sometimes...

20. ...and CBC needs to see through that not amplify bad faith narrative”. He then proceeded to block Nandini and anyone else in relation to the story.

21. Unfortunately (and somewhat predictably) as trans employees and allies decried the fact that their lives and safety were considered secondary to Shopify’s money-making interests, they were told that the discussion was over and to like it or lump it.

22. But who is Kasra Nejatian?

As COVID tapered off and we returned to a “new normal” Shopify noticed a drop off in merchants using the platform. Shopify’s shareholders were unhappy, and share value slid significantly.

23. So first Tobi consolidated power by taking a founder’s share , ensuring that he had primary control over everything.financialpost.com/investing/shop…

24. Then, as numerous C-Suite executives began to quit because of Tobi’s alleged poor interpersonal skills and management style, he brought on Kasra Nejatian as COO.

25. Kasra “Kaz” Nejatian, like Tobi Lutke, is a self-declared free-market fundamentalist. He is also a proud conservative. As a free-market advocate Kasra is opposed to rules and regulations, which may be why as a conservative staffer to Minister Jason Kenney -

26. - Kasra broke fundraising rules by using government money for political campaigning, and was subsequently fired from his position. cbc.ca/news/politics/…

27. The rumour mill in Shopify had long been churning with stories about how Nejatian had brought his rightwing agenda into work. Implied in the rumors was the idea that he wasn’t going to let something as banal as an AUP prevent him from imposing his will.

28. The fact that his wife, Candice Malcolm, is founder of an extreme right-wing charity in Canada called True North that fear-mongers about “degenerates”, “communists” & conflates the LGBTQ community with “groomers” (just like LibsofTikTok) did nothing to dispel those rumors.

29. But it wasn’t until Nandini shared it publicly in the wake of the Libs of TikTok debacle (and Tobi’s reaction) that many employees had to collectively confront the reality that Tobi had appointed a fully-fledged bigot and that Tobi unashamedly stood by-by-side with that bigot

30. Today, the floodgates are truly open on hate stores. From the more mainstream Seb Gorka store to a Nazi memorabilia store; a razor shop that champions masculinity as an antidote to transgenderism, to any of the dozens of Kyle Rittenhouse stores or multitude of Trump stores.

31. It seems that if @Shopify can look forward to a cut of the sales, nothing is off the table.

32. Tobi’s sense of entitlement, his narcissism and ego, and his status as a billionaire need protecting - which is why he used to encourage all his managers to read “The Coddling of the American Mind” by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

33. This is a book that essentially says people need to toughen up and grow a thicker skin. Haidt thinks we’ve been coddled growing up and are now too fragile to be meaningful contributors in this capitalist world.

34. It’s the academic equivalent of saying “oh stop making such a fuss”, which is to paraphrase the line trotted out by just about every reactionary from Louis XIV to Ayn Rand.

35. Every position of power throughout history has used some variation of the “everybody just needs to calm down and be reasonable” line if they’ve felt their privilege being challenged.

36. It’s also deeply ironic. As one former employee once put it:
“They may like Haidt and his ‘coddling of the American mind’ rhetoric, but I can’t think of a more deeply coddled group of people than these execs right now,” […] businessinsider.com/shopify-depart…

37. This laissez-faire, profit-before-people mindset is having a knock on effect for the platform and products themselves, and most significantly the @ShopifySupport side of the business - which we will delve into soon.

38/38. “One doesn’t have to operate with great malice to do great harm. The absence of empathy and understanding are sufficient. In fact, a man convinced of his virtue even in the midst of his vice is the worst kind of man.” ― Charles M. Blow