Are News-letters the Future of Free Speech?

Substack’s Hamish McKenzie on censorship, discourse, and Joe Rogan

- By Matt Welch. Illustration by Joanna Andreasson

“Society has A trust problem,” Substack cofounders Hamish McKenzie, Chris Best, and Jairaj Sethi declared in a joint statement late January. “More censorship will only make it worse.”

Substack, a leading online newsletter company that publishes the likes of polarizing journalist Bari Weiss, Brown University economist Emily Oster, COVID-19 contrarian Alex Berenson, and lefty iconoclast Glenn Greenwald, was reaffirming its hands-off approach to content moderation at a moment of intense pressure to “de-platform” controversial voices. That same week, rocker Neil Young accused Spotify podcaster Joe Rogan of spreading pandemic misinformation and demanded that the platform remove his songs if it continued to offer Rogan’s show; days later, the White House urged Spotify and all other media companies to be more “vigilant” in policing public health news and commentary.

“As we face growing pressure to censor content published on Substack that to some seems dubious or objectionable,” McKenzie and his partners wrote, “our answer remains the same: we make decisions based on principles not PR, we will defend free expression.”