Controversies
Controversies tied to this brand in public sources. A listing is not a finding of fault.
Back to profile4 entries
2023
Dispute over extremist and hateful content
Substack faced criticism after writers and advocacy groups objected to white-nationalist, Nazi, and antisemitic publications on the platform. Several creators threatened to leave or departed, while co-founder Hamish McKenzie defended the company’s permissive moderation philosophy.
2022
Criticism over anti-vaccine content
The Center for Countering Digital Hate criticized Substack for allowing anti-vaccine writers to monetize content that it considered harmful to public health. Substack’s founders defended a minimal-censorship approach.
2021
Substack faces criticism over writer advances and content standards
Public backlash
Writers publishing via Substack criticized its practice of offering advances to selected writers, arguing that it makes the platform seem to make editorial decisions. Some writers announced they would leave the platform. Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie defended the deals as business decisions rather than editorial ones, and the founders published further details about the program.
Company response
Clarification — Substack
“We see these deals as business decisions, not editorial ones,” McKenzie wrote.
Ongoing disclosure — Substack
The second post (bylined by McKenzie and his co-founders Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi) provides additional details about who’s in the program — more than half women, more than one-third people of color, diverse viewpoints but “none that can be reasonably construed as anti-trans” — without actually naming names.
Source excerpt
Last week, the writer Jude Ellison Sady Doyle pointed to writers like Yglesias, Glenn Greenwald and Freddie deBoer (several of whom departed larger publications, supposedly turning to Substack for greater editorial independence) and suggested that the platform has become “famous for giving massive advances [ … ] to people who actively hate trans people and women, argue ceaselessly against our civil rights, and in many cases, have a public history of directly, viciously abusing trans people and/or cis women in their industry.”
Substack has responded with two posts of its own.
“We see these deals as business decisions, not editorial ones,” McKenzie wrote.
2020
Accidental exposure of subscriber email addresses
A policy-update email mistakenly used a visible copy field instead of a hidden one, exposing recipients’ email addresses to other users. Substack acknowledged the error.