Substack’s Curious Views on Content Moderation

A person holding a cell phone. (By: Tati Tata, https://tinyurl.com/t5x5upw; CC BY 2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/) Online speech platforms can all count on controversy over speech and content moderation. It’s what Evelyn Douek calls the “inevitable lifecycle of a user-generated content platform.” Platforms start with a small base of loyal users, but with growth comes scrutiny. Maybe there’s a particular piece of content on the platform that catches public ire. Maybe there’s a general sentiment that the platform turns a blind eye to dangerous content. And then critics, and sometimes users, start to push the company to start more aggressively moderating the content it hosts. Beef up the terms of service. Pay more attention to hate speech. Be transparent about rule-making. Substack has now entered this phase of its life cycle as a popular internet platform. The company, which runs email newsletters for journalists and “ creatives ,” has begun to take some flack for the speech it hosts. Part of the concern comes from particular Substack posts . But there’s also a more general concern. It’s a company that gets branded as a refuge for the “censored.” Free from editorial control at traditional media companies, what types of posts might end up on Substack? And how might Substack reconcile its growing reputation as “a corrective against growing intolerance of heterodoxy” with the inevitable need to get some extreme content off its service? Substack made its own intervention into the conversation on Dec. 22. The company’s three co-founders released a blog post that details “Substack’s view of content moderation.” Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie and Jairaj Sethi acknowledge the reality of the “inevitable lifecycle,” writing, “[a]s Substack grows, there is increasing interest in the stance we take on content moderation.” But the founders seem to be reading Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (or at least some pre-2016 blogs) and try to plant Substack’s flag firmly in the sand: “We prefer a contest of ideas. We believe dissent and debate is important.” Thus, “[a]ll things in moderation—including moderation.” Parts of the blog post contain thoughtful, if unrevolutionary, meditations on the incentive structures that lead to polluted information environments. And the post is revelatory about how this for-profit company thinks about moderation. But the post also elides the company’s own incentives for virality. And it’s a strange document to read in light of the fact that Substack very much does do content moderation. The real question going forward isn’t whether Substack will become “the moral police”—it’s whether and how it will enforce and clarify its own rules. Substack deserves credit for releasing the blog post in the first place. It’s valuable for a young speech platform to release a public text—even a flawed one—upon which it can ground future moderation-related decisions. As Douek wrote of Substack, “Every platform needs to build its view of content moderation in from the beginning and should be upfront about it.” Facebook, for example, has suffered from trying to build a content moderation regime on top of a foundation bereft of any real moral doctrine. And openness about decision-making plays an important role in ensuring the legitimacy of any content moderation system. Polling from the Knight Foundation, for example, found appetite among respondents for transparency from platforms about content moderation. Anna Wiener detailed in the New Yorker that Substack’s founders themselves make all content moderation decisions internally, and one of the founders told her that Substack doesn’t comment on the decisions; transparency is clearly an area of growth for the company, and the blog post is a step in the right direction. The candor in certain parts of the post provides rare, mask-off clarity about the type of thinking that undergirds content moderation at a for-profit organization. Platforms might have principled reasons to pursue a particular content moderation approach. Maybe a platform thinks it’s a moral good to establish and aggressively enforce robust rules, for example. But maybe it also sees content moderation (or lack thereof) as another way to respond to consumer demand. And for all the high-minded stuff in the blog post about the “contest” of ideas and the importance of “free speech” in “help[ing] us survive as a society,” the founders don’t hide their ultimate justification for taking a hands-off moderation approach. They write of their content moderation philosophy: “We welcome competition from anyone who thinks we’re wrong about this …. We are happy to compete with ‘Substack but with more controls on speech.’” At the end of the day, they imply, the ultimate judge of the merits of a particular content moderation approach is the market. A moderation style is “right” if it attracts consumers and lends itself to a monetization strategy. Prove we’re wrong about this remarkably complicated question by raising more Series A funding, they dare. This underlying point has flaws—the marketplace of ideas hasn’t exactly fostered a healthy 21st century information ecosystem—but it’s a helpful clarifying moment; they say the quiet part out loud. The blog post does contain some valuable reflections about the differences between various speech platforms, but the observations end up reading as reductive. The founders assert, correctly, that “Substack is different from social media platforms.” They bemoan that critics often lump Substack in with platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Substack stands out from those behemoths for a couple reasons, they assert. It doesn’t rely on an algorithm that curates feeds “designed to maximize engagement.” Instead, “readers choose what they see.” The founders frame the archetypical speech relationship on its service—reader-to-writer—as a private compact. “A reader makes a conscious decision about which writers to invite into their inboxes ” (emphasis added). So Substack isn’t the public square. It’s more like how people once may have “invite[d]” a thinker or polemicist into their home for a discussion. This framing of the speech dynamics at play bleeds into the platform’s attitudes about moderation. Wiener notes that one of the founders “has suggested that Substack contains a built-in moderation mechanism in the form of the Unsubscribe button.” As Quinta Jurecic characterized it to me, it’s moderation by kicking someone out of your house. The basic observation reflected in this thinking is uncontroversial: Different services have different levels of involvement in connecting users with a particular piece of content. Forums, for example, inflect the journey from poster-to-reader in limited ways: They create certain subgroups that dictate where users can post, or maybe they have a front page collating all the “new” posts. Then there is Facebook, whose algorithm operates like a ceramicist sitting at a pottery wheel: A stream of content inputs—some from pages “liked” by the user, some not—form the clay, and the platform’s proprietary algorithm does the work of shaping the final product. This puts the platform between the content and the user; the platform has significant agency in what users see. Some argue, like the Justice Department has, that the “use of proprietary algorithms” even “blur[s] the line between first and third-party speech.” But the post shies away from acknowledging Substack’s role in the poster-to-user transaction. It’s true that Substack exerts less influence than Facebook or Twitter in meting out content to users. But Substack does try to have some impact. If you link your Twitter account with the service, for example, Substack will send you emails suggesting that you subscribe to writers whom you follow on Twitter. The service also has a centralized “ Discover ” feed that (surely by way of an algorithm) recommends new “Featured” writers to you. In other words, Substack’s proprietary algorithm and marketing emails do shape (or at least try to) what readers see. Substack also pays generous advances to high-profile writers and gives some contributors access to health care or a legal defense fund. This all means, as Weiner writes in the New Yorker, “Substack has made itself difficult to categorize.” It’s not a social media company, but it’s, as she writes, “a software company with the trappings of a digital-media concern.” The blog post makes the service sound more passive than it really is. Then
Substack’s Curious Views on Content Moderation posted first on http://realempcol.tumblr.com/rss