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Substack Was a Ticking Time Bomb | The platform seeded its own content-moderation crisis

The platform seeded its own content-moderation crisis.

Substack was far from perfect, he knew—COVID conspiracies flourished, and on at least one occasion, trans writers on the platform were doxxed and harassed—but compared with the rest of the internet, he found the conditions tolerable. In late November, an investigation in The Atlantic turned up “scores of white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi newsletters on Substack.” Because the site takes a cut of subscription revenue, this meant that Substack was making money off extremists. When it was brought to the attention of Mailchimp—an email-marketing platform with no discernible aspirations to be a social-media powerhouse—that it hosted the newsletter of the white-supremacist podcaster Stefan Molyneux, the company shut down his account the next day.

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