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Substack is to email newsletters what Hoover is to vacuum cleaners in the UK and Colgate to toothpaste in Zambia: none of the companies involved created the original product, but they did so much to introduce it to a wider audience that their brands became synonymous with the whole enterprise.
That’s not to belittle the significance of any of those companies. But it is to say that what often matters most about their fortunes is what it suggests about the future of their industries as a whole.
Today, Substack, which has enjoyed astonishing success since its foundation in 2017, is facing the biggest test of its young life.
The title of a recent article in The Atlantic tells you pretty much all you need to know about the challenge it confronts: “Substack has a Nazi problem”. The piece, which appeared at the end of November, revealed the presence of unabashed Nazis and white supremacists on the platform. Some writers really are out on the political extremes — for example, one Substacker blogs about “markets and the Jewish question”.
But for those of us who have been in the newsletter business somewhat longer than Substack has existed, this story is no surprise at all. One of my many hobby horses is that the newsletter business is not “new media” at all — email is more than half a century old, and the business of newsletters closely resembles that of independent zines and mail-order publications.
It’s certainly true that original thinkers and enthusiastic hobbyists have used newsletters either to impart insight or share best practice — that’s precisely what make them fun to read, whether on Substack or elsewhere. But the history of the newsletter business is also the history of cranks.
People complaining that Substack has brought the email newsletter to neo-Nazis have got the causality the wrong way round. Independent publishing, whether it’s words sent by post or now via email, has always been where discredited and extreme ideas have found a home.
And that is not true just for ideas emanating from the political right, either. You can also find unapologetic Maoists on Substack. One piece I read talked about how the much-maligned Cultural Revolution still holds lessons for revolutionaries today — and I’m sorry to say that the lessons in question did not include “don’t do it”.
But for the newsletter business’s newer — and more profitable — members, the presence of neo-Nazis on the same platform means that they are either quitting Substack or making noises about doing so. Three newsletters I subscribe to have already switched to the rival Buttondown. More troublingly for Substack, Platformer, one of the largest publishers using the service, is also considering a move.
Substack’s argument in response to the Atlantic article was a masterclass in how not to do it: the best way to defeat these ideas, it claimed, was through scrutiny. Frankly, if scrutiny was going to defeat neo-Nazis or the idea that the Cultural Revolution had some upsides, it would have done so already. The response allowed Substack’s critics to draw an unfavourable contrast with how the platform deals with pornography and incitement to violence, both of which it bans, and its handling of extremist political content.
Substack would have been better off not claiming to be a publisher at all. The reality is that it hosts a number of publishers, but Substack itself is a service, a handy bit of infrastructure for sending newsletters. If Substack’s recommendation engine was gradually pushing readers of earnest centre-right and centre-left newsletters towards neo-Nazi content or Maoist apologia, that would be one thing. But it doesn’t: the company makes few editorial judgments beyond “is this obviously illegal and/or unacceptable to our payment providers?” There is no good reason why Substack should be making political judgments about how to use its space any more than, say, a postal service does.
If Substack were a European or British company, the matter would not even arise: both the European Convention’s Article 11, on freedom of association, and even more explicitly the UK’s 2010 Equality Act, place sharp limitations on the ability of businesses or states to discriminate on the grounds of politics.
Of course, there are other ways that British and European law is a colder home to free speech than the US. But as we contemplate the lessons from this Substack spat, one of them is that in an era in which more and more communication is facilitated by private providers, broad European-style protections for political views are a model worth copying.