I love independent publishing and especially platforms that enable authors to stop worrying about the process of publishing so they can get to the content. I am also a firm believer that we each help create the future world we live in by what we write, read, fund, and support.

Substack has emerged to become the frontrunner of a new publishing style: paid subscription newsletters delivered via email and the Web. Substack also has a history of supporting and even proactively recruiting writers of hateful and abhorrent content. Their stated content moderation policy is a “hands-off approach,” and the reality of their enforcement of even their limited content guidelines is lax, bordering on unserious.

This sucks, and we should not use their service.

The part about free speech

People have, I think, wildly misunderstood and misapplied the concept of “free speech” and specifically who is restricted from censoring speech and have applied the idea more broadly to independent publishing from organizations and individuals.

In fact, as a company or as a person, you are under no obligation whatsoever to publish speech with which you disagree, or which you think just shouldn’t be shared. And it should not be an act of revolution to simply stand for principles as a publishing platform, at least at a level that doesn’t amount to “everyone with a pulse has a valid opinion worth broadcasting.”

Who we want to be

We are currently creating, every day, the world we will live in tomorrow. It has become clear (or it always has been) that those publishers espousing support for radical free speech, like Substack, are placing active bets on both sides of a moral spectrum: they are supporting authors with helpful, constructive views, and they are supporting authors with hateful, destructive views, while profiting from both.

Of course free speech is good in society, and governments should not restrict it, but we must each also take an active part in drawing the line in front of morally desirable behavior when it comes to broadcast platforms, however difficult that task may be. I would personally prefer to draw that line short of amplifying both literal Nazis and insidiously loathsome intellectuals like Jordan Peterson, but my point is that publishers can and should make their own choice about where that line is, loudly and firmly. Then we can choose which of them to support based on their values.

Draw the line

Can you morally condemn calls for ethnic cleansing? Can you agree to stop promotion of transphobia, homophobia and denying other humans’ right to exist? Can you disassemble rather than disseminate pseudo-intellectual bullshit and population-scale pathologies of male emotional insecurity and White supremacy?

I can. You should. Substack won’t. You should take your good thoughts to a competitor like Ghost.org, which happens to be a nonprofit with a Terms of Service that includes this:

By using any Service, you agree not to do, or permit others to do, any of the following: … Content that you believe or have reasonable grounds to suspect…promotes discrimination, bigotry, racism, hatred, harassment, abuse or harm against any individual or group

Is Ghost a perfect organization of people? Probably not. But they’ve drawn a line and they don’t have Substack’s slimy history or laughably lax enforcement. Maybe that’s a solution. Maybe you can find better ones.