The super-generous interpretation here is that Substack is trying to hew as closely to free speech absolutism as possible, but I keep thinking about the interview where Nilay Patel asks simple direct questions about content moderation and Substack's CEO just keeps squirming and refusing to answer.

https://www.theverge.com/23681875/substack-notes-twitter-elo...

If you have a clear honest view of what you want your platform to be, you should have no trouble answering those questions. My conclusion therefore is that Substack is simply not being honest about its goals.

Having read the transcript, I have to disagree with your conclusion. The CEO did answer that the terms of service were purposely broad, but binding, what he refused to answer was whether a hypothetical the author came up with was or wasn't against the terms of service. The author clearly set up the question as a 'right' or 'left' political question, and expressed disbelief that the CEO refused to confirm that anyone the author didn't agree with would be censored.

Not true.

He asked a very concrete question :

  Wow. I mean, I just want to be clear, if somebody shows up on Substack and says
  “all brown people are animals and they shouldn’t be allowed in America,” you’re 
  going to censor that. That’s just flatly against your terms of service.

And Chris Best squirmed with non answers.

Interesting how in hindsight, this interview basically foreshadowed this exact thing happening. At one point, the CEO says this:

> And we made that decision very early on in Substack — that you’re going to be able to leave at any time, you take your relationships, you take your payment relationships even, and that put us under a lot of pressure.

Later on, this exchange happens:

> [Reporter]: You can leave and you take your set of subscribers and you get all their emails. Is that why you can’t follow someone? When I asked my team what questions they have, the feature requests came in fast and furious, and one of them was, “Can I just follow someone without subscribing to the newsletter?” And you’ve consciously connected those two things.

> [CEO] I think Casey [Newton] put this as, “I wish I could flirt with people before I had to make a commitment.”

> [Reporter]: Casey Newton.

> [CEO]: Yes. Casey’s substack is Platformer.news. It’s a good Substack. You should subscribe.

Casey's quote is linked from the article. Clicking it now, it shows up saying "this note is not available": https://substack.com/profile/241262-casey-newton/note/c-1446...

Kudos to Casey Newton. Looking forward to his informal breakdown on Hard Fork podcast tomorrow.

This may sound like random drama outside of media but there are newsworthy behaviors from Substack that caused this:

> In the end, we found seven that conveyed explicit support for 1930s German Nazis and called for violence against Jews, among other groups. Substack removed one before we sent it to them. The others we sent to the company in a spirit of inquiry: will you remove these clear-cut examples of pro-Nazi speech? The answer to that question was essential to helping us understand whether we could stay.

> It was not, however, a comprehensive review of hate speech on the platform. And to my profound disappointment, before the company even acted on what we sent them, Substack shared the scope of our findings with another, friendlier publication on the platform, along with the information that these publications collectively had few subscribers and were not making money. (It later apologized to me for doing this.)

> The point of this leak, I believe, was to make the entire discussion about hate speech on Nazis on Substack appear to be laughably small: a mountain made out of a molehill by bedwetting liberals.

> before the company even acted on what we sent them, Substack shared the scope of our findings with another, friendlier publication on the platform

Everything else aside, if they can't help themselves from doing petty stuff like this, why would you let them manage your subscriptions?

Another side of the story...

https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/platformers-reporting-on-...

For anyone looking to read, it might be worthwhile to do a careful review of some of the other articles on this substack. Considering the focus on anti-trans rhetoric, and the correlation between that and far right ideologies, it's not very surprising the author wouldn't consider Nazis a problem.

While all writing is biased, an important aspect of media literacy is understanding the biases at play in any specific text.