The Moderation War Is Coming to Spotify, Substack, and Clubhouse
Smaller services are coming under scrutiny now that the big platforms have warmed to aggressive moderation
Glenn Greenwald was pissed. The Columbia Journalism Review had just asked whether Substack should remove the writer Andrew Sullivan from its service. And having recently joined the email newsletter platform himself, Greenwald attacked.
“It was only a matter of time before people started demanding Substack be censored,” he said, taking it a step further than the CJR.
Last October, Greenwald left The Intercept, a publication he founded, claiming the publication’s editors, who previously hadn’t touched his work, “censored” him ahead of the 2020 election. So he moved to Substack, which advertises itself as a home for independent writing. Seeing a reporter point out Substack’s lack of moderation set him off.
CJR reporter Clio Chang pushed Substack to take a stance on Sullivan for a simple reason. Sullivan had previously published excerpts from The Bell Curve, a 1994 book that attempted to link IQ to race. Chang asked Substack’s founders whether his presence could cause other writers to shy away from the platform. Its paid newsletters, she noted, were already very white and male at the top.
