Substack Leadership (Hopefully) Wakes Up
After a Substack writer was deported, the site’s leaders seem to recognize that Trump isn’t actually fighting for free speech.
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A few weeks ago, Alistair Kitchen, an Australian writer with an MFA from Columbia University, flew from Melbourne, Australia, to Los Angeles to see friends. He was detained, interrogated, and ultimately deported from the US seemingly because of the writing he did on his Substack, where he documented the pro-Palestine protests on Columbia’s campus in 2024. You can read his account of his harrowing experience in The New Yorker.
Substack leadership wrote a post decrying Kitchen’s detention and deportation entitled “Standing up for free speech, even at the border.” (A title, it seems, meant to pander to those who believe the United States is being invaded by a criminal army full of people who don’t deserve free speech rights. Not a good look.) They wrote: “This isn’t about Kitchen’s views. It’s about a core democratic value: the right to express dissenting opinions without fear of state retaliation.”
We agree. But before you rejoice that Substack is now a bona fide member of Team Truth, read the next paragraph:
In an era of growing censorship around the world, it’s more important than ever that the U.S. stand up for free speech—not just in practice, but in the example it sets for the world.
Earlier this year, Vice President JD Vance took this perspective on the global stage. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, he talked about the rise in government censorship worldwide and promised that the United States would champion free speech: “Under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer them in the public square.” It’s a principled stance, and one that should apply regardless of who is in power or what the writer believes. Denying someone entry over their Substack posts sends the opposite message.
Celebrating JD Vance’s Munich Security Council speech as if he is a free expression crusader is laughable at best, dangerous at worst. As we’ve documented here, here, here, and here, Vance and the Trump administration writ large have used the “censorship” lie as a cudgel to intimidate those researching disinformation and introduce other restrictions on speech. Substack is just woefully late in recognizing it. They still seem to be in denial, making an appeal to democratic values and reason within an administration that has demonstrated neither.
It’s not surprising. Substack’s view of the false choice between content moderation and “censorship” has always been cloaked in what I like to call “free speech fairy dust.” It’s an old trend; tech companies from Facebook and Twitter circa 2018 to the current iterations of Meta and X have used their “commitment to free expression” to justify their poor or inexplicable content moderation decisions that have led to online and offline harm. Rather than doubling down on the hard work of making their platforms spaces where everyone can express themselves without being abused or worse, some of them have become places where the world’s biggest liars get paid for harming people.
Substack has gone even further, arguing that they’re not a social media platform, just a newsletter service, so they don’t need to do content moderation in the traditional sense. This may have been true in Substack’s early days when it was truly just a tech stack that sent emails out, but couldn’t be farther from the truth today. Algorithmic recommendations abound. Substack’s “Notes,” was, for about a millisecond, seen as an heir of Twitter. Writers can interact with specific communities they build in “Chats,” similar to Facebook Groups. It’s a social network.
Despite characteristics that one would assume require some moderation, Substack uses what it calls a “hands-off approach” to outsource that work to individual writers. If those writers want to ban users from their communities, that’s up to them. Substack leadership does not really engage with the assertion that certain writers themselves—including those with hundreds of thousands of followers, writing lies and inciting harassment behind paywalls, making five- and six-figure monthly incomes through their incendiary rhetoric—might need a little moderation, too.
For the past four years, a group of powerful people has claimed that any moderation, any research that studies harmful online content, any efforts within government or civil society to hold tech to account for the harm they cause is akin to censorship. Substack has blithely agreed, both in its own policy and its public pronouncements; Chris Best, one of Substack’s founders, even wrote a lily-livered post a few days after Trump’s second inauguration heralding what he seemed to think was going to be a brave new era of free speech absolutism in America.
But free speech absolutism is rarely ever absolute. The most famous free speech absolutists in the U.S. today—Elon Musk, Trump, and Vance—use it to mean “free speech for me and not for thee.” They are happy to pull back on basic rules that private platforms have established to protect the marginalized and silenced, all so some white guy who is feeling disenfranchised can tweet a racial slur unencumbered, all while throttling, deplatforming, and even arresting those who use their First Amendment rights to criticize and hold to account.
In short: Substack threw in its lot with the people who claimed content moderation was censorship. Those people now run the United States of America, and with that awesome power, they themselves are engaging in overt, unapologetic censorship.
I’m glad the free speech fairy dust seems to be warning off at Substack HQ. But it’s never too late to say “we told you so.”
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