I just discovered this – “legal support for Substack writers”
Important writing holds the powerful to account – and quite often, that’s an arrangement that the powerful would rather not support. In some cases, antagonists use threats of legal action in an attempt to stop the work that makes them uncomfortable. Recently, for instance, a high-powered lawyer representing a politician threatened a Substack writer for his coverage of the lawmaker’s questionable business ties. The threats disappeared when the writer, backed by our support program’s lawyers, stood his ground. At Substack, we want to make it crystal clear that anyone who uses such intimidation tactics will also have to reckon with us. We will use our financial and legal resources to vigorously oppose any bad-faith efforts to dissuade Substack writers from doing their work.
Substack will make the ultimate choice on who is accepted into the [Defender] program and which cases to support. Once a case has been taken on by the program’s lawyers, Substack, at our discretion, will cover fees up to $1 million (in exceptional cases, we may cover even more).
This is a bold, brave move by the company, and I would definitely rather this program exist than not. There are several major journalists (one, two, three are just highlights) moving to Substack, and they will need this sort of institutional cover to form 21st Century Media.
However, it puts Substack in the position of determining what opinions and positions should be defended and what not. Specifically, it puts Substack’s founders in that position. While the scale is very different today, the situation is little different from the Facebook leader being ultimately in the position of what is censored and what is promoted on the service and what isn’t.
In fact in Facebook’s case, we are taking about censorship of content. The Substack legal support program is not just about censorship but about the personal, potentially physical freedom of the writer – that is what writers are choosing to outsource, for lack of an alternative.
End-note: independent of legal protection, journalists should also invest time and effort in figuring out how to be uncensorable. We examined it a few months ago: Part 1, Part 2. If you publish on your own site and encourage your readers to read you over the open web, or subscribe to your writing via RSS, and pay you in cryptocurrency, you become a lot more difficult to shut down. You can of course continue to publish that content over Substack, and share it on Twitter and engage wit your followers there. Ultimately the truly censorship-resistance platform is the one you host.