Bloomberg's Pathetic Swipe at Substack

Bloomberg wants Substack to make the platform a safer space for its new hordes of mainstream washouts by censoring its controversial riffraff. A reply to the snobs

With Donald Trump back in office, freedom of speech is back in vogue. Vox, which put the word “censorship” in quotation marks in Biden-era coverage, is decrying Trump’s “assault” on the First Amendment. The same Washington Post that ignored years of censorship controversies is (hilariously) just now running “What to know about First Amendment rights” pieces. Looking down the business end of censorship threats seems to have inspired everyone in the press to get civil liberties religion.

Almost everyone, that is. From Jessica Karl at Bloomberg, in “Everyone Has a Substack. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?”:

I’m by no means advocating for mass censorship, but there must be a greater focus on veracity to ensure the platform doesn’t become a vessel for misleading narratives… Media professionals… are leaving traditional outlets and establishing a foothold on Substack... Do they want their work to exist in a space that also houses an unverified hit piece by an anti-Semite? Probably not.

In 2022, the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate revealed that Substack generated $2.5 million a year from anti-vax content… In December 2023, that stance was stress-tested once again when The Atlantic published an article titled “Substack Has a Nazi Problem…” Although they ended up removing five Nazi newsletters, the core policy remained unchanged.

In a polarized commercial media space, pressure has always been brought to bear on tech platforms to choose sides. Right and left long fought for influence within Google or Facebook. The anti-Substack rants that filled corporate op-ed pages for years, though, were always transparent arguments to suppress or boycott the whole platform as a thinly-veiled bigoted/conservative outpost. Of course it never was that, but this was the argument.

Now, with corporate press in collapse and hordes of refugees of the Jennifer Rubin/Norm Eisen/Jim Acosta type fleeing here in the hope of monetizing last microns of name recognition, an effort is coming to sanitize the platform. I first heard months ago that some of these new arrivals were under the impression that Substack executives would feel so lucky to have them, they’d consider ridding the platform of its more disreputable riffraff. In other words, rather than simply crush an annoying independent competitor, the new argument will be about making Substack a safe space for its influx of mainstream snowflakes.

I didn’t believe anyone would say this out loud until I read the Bloomberg piece. “I’m not in favor of censorship, but” has been one of the most loathsome tropes in the legacy op-ed space, but even within the genre, Karl’s piece stands out. As Beavis and Butthead would say, it’s the “ass of the ass.” Lowlights: