Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse.

Heavy-handed censorship can draw more attention to content than it otherwise would have enjoyed, and at the same time it can give the content creators a martyr complex that they can trade off for future gain. We prefer a contest of ideas. We believe dissent and debate is important.

We believe in letting people choose who to trust, not having click-maximizing algorithms choose for them.

With that in mind, we commit to keeping Substack wide open as a platform, accepting of views from across the political spectrum. We will resist public pressure to suppress voices that loud objectors deem unacceptable. If you look at Substack’s leaderboards today, you’ll see writers from the left and the right, the populist and the elite, the low-br... See more

The end result is a world where the ability for anyone to post any idea has, paradoxically, meant far greater mass adoption of popular ideas and far more effective suppression of “bad” ideas. That is invigorating when one feels the dominant idea is righteous; it seems reasonable to worry about the potential of said sense of righteousness overwhelmi... See more

We believe that hosting a broad range of views is good for democracy.

If the old systems have failed to allocate authority effectively, what new tools can we come up with to sift true misinformation from information the monarchy doesn't like? The solution isn't to give up and say we can't be trusted with unfettered access to information. It's to figure out how to help people make better sense of all that information ... See more