Great Place, Awful Neighborhood

Reconciling My Place in Substack with Its Quiet Marriage with White Supremacy

Cover art by me, using royalty-free photos by Serinus and Abiy Fikru. Photos sourced from Pexels.com.

Shortly after I started Queen’s Muse four months ago, I already knew of Substack’s quiet marriage with white supremacy. I did my best to curate my feed and inbox with Black creatives to avoid any interaction with the racists on this platform. While doing this, I discovered that African writers on Substack could not monetize their writing on the platform. Then last month, I read Ismatu Gwendolyn’s¹ essay, “Substack Has a N*gger Problem”, and received a sobering reminder. In spite of my efforts to moderate my own experience on this platform, there was no avoiding the racism that had integrated itself into Substack’s ecosystem.

I couldn’t bypass Substack’s problem anymore, but what was I to do with a relatively new publication?

After giving it some thought, I decided to turn off paid subscriptions to Queen’s Muse. According to the Publisher Agreement, if I charge a subscription fee for my publication, readers cannot be asked to support me by any other payment method. Directing readers to a Patreon or PayPal would be in breach of that agreement.

So from now on, this newsletter will be entirely free, and readers can support me on Buy Me A Coffee.² As a writer, I can offer more than one subscription tier, and folks can give me a flat amount without creating an account. This is not an advertisement, but an offered solution to those who don’t want to share the support of their readers with a platform that allows racism to run rampant. It is also a solution that I believe African writers can use to monetize their work as well.

I will continue to use Substack because it is useful to me as a writer. And I have found so much beautiful, long-form writing from Black people here that I will remain a reader here as well. It is painful to know that the great work of these artists must share space with awful ideologies and harmful language. This pain kept bringing up a question, nagging at me as I would scroll through notes and read posts:

Your support allows me to continue working and growing my craft that much more.

Every bit counts, and thank you for your consideration!

How did Substack end up like this?

In my first few weeks on Substack, I seemed to have joined the platform along with a wave of writers who were looking for a new place to share their work and find community. There was excitement at the potential of this strange place that centered long-form blogging, yet had a social media feature that translated well to our phones. The two common refrains of my fellow newcomers were that Notes are better than Twitter and that Substack was a place of refuge for those who left Tumblr.³

Both of the platforms mentioned have been hemorrhaging money over the past several years. Twitter has lost potentially 80% of its value since Elon Musk purchased the platform and laid off a large portion of its global moderation team. The following proliferation of white supremacist messaging, transphobia, and every other phobia under the sun, have sent advertisers and users fleeing to its competitors. Tumblr lost a significant portion of its user base and advertisers after child pornography was found on its website.⁴ The resulting adult content ban also alienated a large portion of its user base, causing further losses in users. It was the decisions around content moderation following these events that undid both social media platforms.

Both of companies had popular websites and had large influxes of cash from either exchanging hands (Tumblr) or becoming a publicly traded company (Twitter). Unfortunately, their inability to make a profit through advertising meant that they would always be in the red. If a platform relying on ad revenue cannot moderate its content to the liking of advertisers, it will ultimately go under. Platforms like YouTube and Instagram are quick to remove content that would offend the sensibilities of their well-paying investors, because no one wants the ad for their product placed next to depictions of crimes against humanity.⁵ For TikTok as well, certain words have been censored so much by unscrupulous algorithms that people have had to come up with substitutions like “fashionism” and “unaliving” to avoid automated punishment.

The draconian algorithms these platforms use is an unsuccessful attempt to create a panacea for an ill they could never cure. The calculations of these machines cannot discern whether a depiction of violence is for critique or for incitement. A formula cannot discern whether nudity is artful expression or base pornography. At best, platforms can utilize a tiered approach that requires a level of human moderation—but that comes at a heavy human cost. No matter how many categories, conditions, or qualifications you add to a moderation system, there is no perfect solution. While the public-facing argument for these failed solutions is to protect people from harm, the goal is to protect itself from liability and its investors from losing money.

And this is where we return to Substack. What makes Substack unique amongst other social media platforms is that its primary source of income doesn’t come from advertising. It comes from the paid subscribers to publications and podcasts on the platform. If you have a publication with a paid Subscription on Substack, you agree to share 10% of your revenue with the platform. Though it is admirable that the company chooses to align its success with that of its writers, that choice has consequences in how it approaches moderation.

By not relying on the attraction of advertisers, the problem of adequate moderation can be delegated to the people reliant most on it. If something offends you, block them. If someone breaks the Content Guidelines or Publisher Agreement, you can report them. While the block and report features are not unique to Substack, what does make it unique is that what it moderates in terms of speech is as sparse as it is vague.

Here’s the “In General” and “Hate” sections in Substack’s content guidelines:

In General

We want Substack to be a safe place for discussion and expression. At the same time, we believe that critique and discussion of controversial issues are part of robust discourse, so we work to find a reasonable balance between these two priorities. In all cases, Substack does not allow credible threats of physical harm.

Hate

Substack cannot be used to publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes. Offending behavior includes credible threats of physical harm to people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability or medical condition.

“Credible threats of physical harm,” and funding/inciting violence against protected classes are big no-noes, but nothing about hate speech.

Setting aside the question of who decides which threats are “credible,” it isn’t a far-fetched conclusion that everything short of breaking the law or the conditions mentioned above are fair game. As far as Substack is concerned, if someone makes them money and is not considered a legal liability, what they write is their business. And if you don’t like it? Ignore it, block it, or go elsewhere. The onus of content moderation is placed at the feet of each individual user because there is money to be made in allowing hate speech.

But here’s the kicker: Substack is also not profitable.

There are no shortage of creative strategies to solve this issue, like partnering with A Free Press and connecting advertisers to podcasts.⁶ With these attempts in mind, all signs point to Substack needing every dollar it can get. No matter the ideology, politic, or vitriol.

This lack of discernment does have a limited benefit, though. Revolutionary and radical voices, like those who support Palestinian liberation, can make their presence known. Marginalized and underrepresented writers who would otherwise not have access to an audience due to institutional biases and discrimination can find them here. Critique of systems that would try to have your work demonetized or your account (shadow)banned seems to have more room to move here.⁷

Despite the benefit, however, it is disconcerting to know that Substack regards voices advocating for justice no differently than voices supporting the oppression of the most vulnerable.

But alas, this is nothing new. There is a long legacy of Black artists making their means within in places that did not care for them. Musicians, actors, comedians, I am no exception, and neither is Substack. We will do what we are called to do until there is no denying us. And in the same way many Black people are moving on from Twitter, I hope we keep that same energy for Substack too if it stops serving us.

To Black writers reading this: find your audience, get your money, then take them both with you and leave.

We’re leaving here with something.

1. Whom I found prior on Instagram while using my lurker account, which I’ve left gathering dust for about two months now.

2. Despite also using Stripe, Buy Me A Coffee uses a Stripe product that allows creators residing in 116 countries to get paid for their work. You can only get paid through Substack in 46 countries, with an additional five in beta. My educated guess is that Substack probably built its infrastructure integrated with an earlier Stripe product, and Substack hasn’t deemed transitioning to a product with greater accessibility worth the cost.

3. I sadly missed out on Black Twitter and the heyday of Tumblr. Twitter, as well as Bluesky, is too overwhelming for me to use, but that’s probably because I use my desktop more than my phone. As for Tumblr, I wasn’t queer enough (nor were my friends) to use it back in its heyday. I’ve come a long way, though!

4. Twitter had its own problem with this rather recently, and almost every other social media/public forum platform have struggled with this issue as well.

5. Regardless of their actual investment in said crimes.

6. I found out that they once offered a $500 health insurance stipend to writers at one point (only the ones making $5000, though).

7. If your experience is different, please let me know. I’m still relatively new here.