Platforms are not neutral

I’ve been thinking a bit about two pieces that talk about Substack, the massively popular and occasionally controversial newsletter platform:

• Anil Dash’s “Don’t Call it a Substack”
• John Gruber’s “Regarding—and, Well, Against—Substack”

They both come to the same conclusion, essentially: that you shouldn’t put your writing on Substack. As Dash writes,

The reason Substack wants you to call your creative work by their brand name is because they control your audience and distribution, and they want to own your content and voice, too.

Or, as Gruber puts it more simply: “The company’s long-term goal is clearly platform lock-in”.

Yet, they don’t make the same arguments. Dash’s is more about taking a philosophical and political stand:

Substack is, just as a reminder, a political project made by extremists with a goal of normalizing a radical, hateful agenda by co-opting well-intentioned creators’ work in service of cross-promoting attacks on the vulnerable. […] The counter-argument people generally have is convenience…and the theoretical benefits of network effect from being on Substack. Which is largely a myth (most referrals are thanks to other writers, not the platform) and means you have to be open to the platform using your writing to introduce people to the most insidious anti-trans and white supremacist rhetoric on the internet.

Gruber largely dismisses that argument, but dislikes Substack’s homogenizing aesthetics:

What I object to isn’t their laissez-faire approach to who they allow to publish on their platform, but rather how they present all publications. […] Substack publications do all look the same, most of them right down to that telltale serif typeface, Spectral, which is kerned so loosely it looks like teeth in need of orthodontia.

I fully agree with that (down to the kerning complaint), but I’m not so quick to elide the political argument. Gruber sees it this way:

I think Substack sees itself as a publishing tool and platform. They’re not here to promote any particular side. It makes no more sense for them to refuse to publish someone for being too right-wing than it would for WordPress or Medium or, say, GitHub or YouTube. Substack, I think, sees itself like that.

Substack certainly claims to see itself like that, and they may be absolutely sincere about it. Yet virtually all platforms make that claim. Elon Musk and his supporters maintain that Twitter’s transmogrification into X has made it far more like that than it had been. And while that’s transparently mendacious bullshit, I think it raises an important point: publishing platforms can have editorial viewpoints, not just publications.

It’s still possible to find a wide range of political and cultural viewpoints being expressed on X/Twitter, but you can’t make a credible argument that all viewpoints are treated neutrally on the system. Editorial decisions are made across nearly all platforms that allow user-created content, all the time. You see it in what language and which subjects are more frequently moderated and the severity of the moderation; you see it in what’s being promoted by the platform itself, whether algorithmically or human-curated. Bluesky’s moderation team exhibits little sympathy for blatant transphobia, while X’s moderation team is on board with the idea that “cis” is a slur. Creators booted off Patreon for content policy violations often find SubscribeStar welcoming, and darned if a disproportionate number of the most successful creators at SS aren’t visibly far right.

I don’t know if it’s fair to call Substack an extremist political project, but Jude Ellison Sady Doyle brought receipts about far-right writers who aren’t just hosted on Substack but were actively recruited (and given large advances, to boot) by the company. And as Annalee Newitz wrote, while Substack claims that their paid writers came from across the political spectrum, they don’t offer any proof of that beyond “trust us,” and as far as I can tell the only people who’ve spoken up about being paid are precisely the contrarian conservatives Doyle was writing about.

On a technical level, one can argue with Doyle’s assertion that Substack isn’t a self-publishing platform: anybody can sign up and start publishing, after all. But that doesn’t mean Substack isn’t doing curation. They choose creators to actively recruit to their platform and to give advances to. They decide who is—and isn’t—promoted on their front page. And, of course, they determine who is—and isn’t—in violation of their terms of service.

Is there a bias in who Substack actively promotes? You couldn’t make a slam-dunk argument for that based on their front page as of today (November 26), where out of eight “featured” publications, four are arguably political, with two (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo) on the left and two (Bari Weiss’s Free Press and Andrew Sullivan’s Weekly Dish) on the right. Of course, we know that Sullivan and Weiss were actively courted, and as far as I can tell, Abdul-Jabbar and Hasan were not. Yet, the terms of service violations—and lack thereof—are revealing. Despite what right-wingers like to believe, nobody gets banned from major platforms for being “too right-wing”. They get banned for hateful rhetoric, harassment, and threats of violence, often after repeated warnings. From all appearances, Substack lets a lot more of that slide than other platforms do. Maybe there’s a whole coterie of active, popular Tankie Substacks being given the same pass that literal Nazi Substacks have been, but if so, nobody’s reported on them.

An objection that could be raised: if a platform successfully insulates you from things you don’t want to see, does it matter? Gruber again:

For the last few weeks I’ve tried using [Substack’s] iOS app, and I’ve never once seen a whiff of anything even vaguely right-wing, let alone hateful. Not a whiff. If it’s there, I never see it. If I never see it, I don’t care.

I don’t have the iOS app, and when I visited the Substack website, I wasn’t logged in. It’s quite possible that Substack is good at keeping the Free Press out of your recommendations if you’re subscribed to Heather Cox Richardson. Maybe, if you consider yourself on the left but more left of center than activist progressive, Substack is smart enough to show you content that’s just slightly right of center. It doesn’t show you the Free Press headline about the Kindergarten Intifada I swear I am not making up, but it shows you the interview with Seth Moulton about how the Democrats are “too focused on trans issues.” You like that? That seems reasonable? How about how a few of RFK Jr.’s policies are similar to a few policies you can find around Europe? Huh! That’s not right-wing, is it? We’re just asking questions, right?

That’s where Dash’s argument rings more true to me. It’s extremely unlikely you’re going to see Substack push a link to a white supremacist article under Matt Yglesias’s newsletter. But how about a “gender critical” one? I don’t think I’m being unfair when I describe Yglesias as an increasingly centrist pundit, and YouTube amply demonstrates how easy it is for an algorithm to hopscotch you from centrist material to right-of-center to far right to holy shit.

And YouTube, for all its many problems, doesn’t have an ideological thumb on the scale. Maybe Substack doesn’t, either. But in our present age, it’s hard not to notice that the platforms and publications that trumpet their support for free speech the most fervently all too often have very specific kinds of speech in mind that they want to “protect”—and to promote.

At the end of the day, I think Substack is a platform, not a publication. But being a platform doesn’t make it neutral.