A New Global Attack To Censor Me

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As noted by Alex Berenson30 — another Substack refugee named by The Guardian aside from myself — “Chelsea apparently expected Twitter high-fives for her denunciation of ‘anti-vaxx grift.’ 5,600 replies later, things did not go as planned.”

People had no problem finding articles pointing out Chelsea’s own inclination for grift — and some were more popular than her original tweet. As noted by Berenson, “When the first reply ripping you gets more likes than your tweet, you might want to reconsider whether your position is as popular as you thought.”

Will the Censored Library Survive on Substack?

Whether Substack will keep to its course and resist demands for censorship remains to be seen. For now, I’m optimistic.

“Last year, in an interview with the New York Times, anthropologist Heidi Larson, founder of the Vaccine Confidence Project, said that efforts to silence people who doubt the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines won’t get us very far,” Substack cofounders Hamish McKenzie, Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi wrote in a January 26, 2022, post.31

“’If you shut down Facebook tomorrow,’ she said, ‘it’s not going to make this go away. It’ll just move.’ Public health solutions, then, would have to come from a different approach. ‘We don’t have a misinformation problem,’ Larson said. ‘We have a trust problem.’

This point rings true to us. That’s why, as we face growing pressure to censor content published on Substack that to some seems dubious or objectionable, our answer remains the same: we make decisions based on principles not PR, we will defend free expression, and we will stick to our hands-off approach to content moderation.

While we have content guidelines that allow us to protect the platform at the extremes, we will always view censorship as a last resort, because we believe open discourse is better for writers and better for society …

We are living through an epidemic of mistrust … Trust in social media and traditional media is at an all-time low. Trust in the U.S. federal government to handle problems is at a near-record low. Trust in the U.S.’s major institutions is within 2 percentage points of the all-time low.

The consequences are profound. Declining trust is both a cause and an effect of polarization, reflecting and giving rise to conditions that further compromise our confidence in each other and in institutions …

To put it plainly: censorship of bad ideas makes people less likely, not more likely, to trust good ideas. The key to making this all work is giving power to writers and readers. That’s why at Substack we focus on subscriptions instead of advertising, and it’s why Substack writers own and control their relationships with their readers.”

Without doubt, Substack is presently one of the best sources of “good ideas” available, for the very reason that free speech is allowed. In the end, leadership that depends on censorship to succeed tends to fail, for the simple reason that it erodes trust.

Sources and References

The post A New Global Attack To Censor Me appeared first on LewRockwell.


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