Rereading “Editorial Discretion”

The media can free itself from the forces that arouse its self-destructive impulses. Some of the tools are already in our hands—antitrust laws to break up tech monopolies. Other tools would change the structure of the game—for example, regulations to classify digital platforms as publishers, with the resulting responsibilities and liabilities. Tech

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Few serious observers can consider what we might call the “public square” platforms—particularly Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and the public square’s library, Google—a boon to democracy. Nor are they a flourishing intellectual marketplace. Although it is tempting to shrug at their problems by comparing them to the heated partisan newspapers of the e... See more

OK fine, but aren’t calls to ban Nazis a slippery slope? If Substack caves in here, there will be no end to what people like you call for them to remove.

The slippery-slope argument here is based on the fantasy that if you simply draw the right line, you will never have to revisit it. The fact is that we are constantly renegotiating the boundaries ... See more

This is the area where we hope to make a contribution with Substack. While the attention economy generates power from exploiting base impulses and moments of attention, a healthy information economy would derive power from the strength and quality of relationships that are built over time. The strength of these relationships would depend on the wri... See more