ARE NEWS-LETTERS THE FUTURE OF FREE SPEECH?
“SOCIETY HAS A trust problem,” Substack cofounders Hamish McKenzie, Chris Best, and Jairaj Sethi declared in a joint statement late January. “More censorship will only make it worse.”
Substack, a leading online newsletter company that publishes the likes of polarizing journalist Bari Weiss, Brown University economist Emily Oster, COVID-19 contrarian Alex Berenson, and lefty iconoclast Glenn Greenwald, was reaffirming its hands-off approach to content moderation at a moment of intense pressure to “deplatform” controversial voices. That same week, rocker Neil Young accused Spotify podcaster Joe Rogan of spreading pandemic misinformation and demanded that the platform remove his songs if it continued to offer Rogan’s show; days later, the White House urged Spotify and all other media companies to be more “vigilant” in policing public health news and commentary.
“As we face growing pressure to censor content published on Substack that to some seems dubious or objectionable,” McKenzie and his partners wrote, “our answer remains the same: we make decisions based on principles not PR, we will defend free expression.”
Those principles have been good for business thus far. Since launching in 2017, Substack has grown to more than a million paying subscribers, boasts a valuation of $650 million, and has drawn venture capital funding from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz. The company’s pitch to writers is seductive: You set a couple of subscription tiers (the most common price points are $5 a month and free), you let Substack facilitate the payment processing in return for a 10 percent cut, and then all the customer information and content is owned not by the platform but by the creators, who can leave at any time. In 2021, flush with investment money, Substack began a “Substack Pro” program of cash enticements to lure name writers away from imploding media organizations or their own unpaid blogs, including Matt Taibbi from and Matthew Yglesias from Of late, the company has taken an interest in breaking into the lucrative podcasting biz, poaching Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog’s from the market-leading Patreon payments service. (It may soon, which ’s Matt Welch co-hosts with Kmele Foster and Michael Moynihan.)
