A Victory for Substack

The self-appointed censors have decamped, yet the danger remains

Image by Joseph Barrientos, Unsplash

As many of you know, over the past month or so there has been a concentrated push by certain Substack writers who maintain prominent mainstream media ties to press the ownership of Substack to adopt similar measures of private-sector censorship as those applied by mainstream media sites. I wrote about these briefly last month when the discussion was coming to a head, of sorts, in the wake of Substack’s leadership having clarified that substantial changes to the site’s content moderation policies would not be implemented.

Unsurprisingly, the censorious clique, while immediately making noises about relocating their newsletters to alternative hosts, did not cease and desist from its efforts to isolate, embarrass, and manipulate Substack’s management to do its bidding. This latest attempt reached its climax with the various missives issued by Casey Newton detailing his attempts to pressure Substack’s management into caving to the demands being made by the censorious clique.

Substack’s response to these efforts was deft and quite close to perfect.

While agreeing with Newton that 5 of the 6 sites he brought to their attention violated Substack’s existing content moderation guidelines (which sensibly restrict speech that incites violence), it nevertheless made clear, via leaks to other reporters who write on Substack, that the total readership of these sites taken altogether was less than 100 persons, and that none of them had ever been monetized.

These revelations substantially deflated any sense of “win” that Newton could claim (although he did attempt a half-hearted, and rather pathetic, victory lap of sorts), by making crystal clear one basic fact: there may very well be a small number of nazi and neo-nazi sites on Substack (and now apparently 5 fewer of them, which is good), but these sites are tiny in readership and are very small in number overall. Neither Newton nor Jonathan Katz, the main instigator of the current controversy, both of whom are highly motivated to find as many examples to support their claims as possible, were able to provide evidence, either to Substack or to anyone else, of any substantial problem beyond a handful of sites with a tiny readership.

By handling Newton’s attempts to manipulate them in this way — that is, by addressing decisively and appropriately the small problem that was brought to its attention while at the same time making clear the very small scope of the problem overall —, the leadership of Substack passed a critical test. The fact of this was not lost on either Newton or the other ring-leaders of the censorious clique. The evidence of this is the fact that in the wake of these actions, all of the leading voices in support of greater censorship — Jonathan Katz, Casey Newton, Marisa Kabas … even the notorious plagiarist Ryan Broderick — announced that they were relocating their publications to different hosts.

And, coming as a kind of “icing on the cake”, investigative reporter Jesse Singal published a damning review of Katz’s “journalism” on this topic yesterday evening, having unearthed very questionable, and apparently deliberately misleading, use by Katz of his sources, and the related lackadaisical (at the very best) efforts of The Atlantic to “clarify” them in response to Singal’s investigations.

While some of these publications will take a fair number of readers with them, this is nevertheless a great victory for Substack as a platform, because it indicates to a much larger group of writers of all political stripes that Substack remains strongly and demonstrably committed to its core values of being an open platform for discussion that is subject only to very light a priori content constraints. That is an important victory for the rest of us to celebrate, as we watch the censorious clique thankfully leave the building.

Yet a very real danger remains in the months, and even years, ahead.

We can be under no illusion that this crowd will stop in its efforts to “dismantle” what Substack has built here. This can be seen by the approach they’ve taken with Elon Musk’s version of Twitter, which, while very imperfect to say the least, is nevertheless a vast improvement over the choked, censorious monologue the site had become under the iron fists of this same censorious clique. As with Twitter, the clique will not let any opportunity slide to attack, undermine, destabilize, marginalize and toxify the name of Substack as part of a campaign to delegitimize the site, as punishment for its defiance of the content censorship norms of the mainstream media.

In light of this reality, Substack must remain on high vigilance to resist these efforts when they inevitably arise, and we, as the writers and readers of the newsletters hosted on Substack, must do all we reasonably can to foil these attacks when they inevitably come — because they truly are inevitable … it is how this group rolls. It falls squarely on each of us to do what we can in the time ahead to help Substack in its efforts to sustain and grow this very promising beachhead of openness in the context of an internet that is becoming more constrained and controlled by the day.