The fight for free speech in 2025 and beyond

On Substack’s ongoing commitment to freedom of the press

Principles have a price. Anyone can stand up for their values when it’s popular and easy, but principles are tested when standing up has a cost.

I’ve had a chance to learn this lesson over the last eight years watching many courageous writers, journalists, and thinkers who stand up and exercise their freedom of expression, often at significant cost to themselves.

In the past few weeks, political commentator Jennifer Rubin and editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes each quit the Washington Post in protest of leadership decisions that, as Rubin put it, “undercut the values central to The Post’s mission and that of all journalism: integrity, courage, and independence.” They’ve left rare stable jobs in journalism to strike out on their own—Telnaes in her Substack Open Windows and Rubin in The Contrarian, a new media project with a bold credo: Not Owned by Anybody.

Journalists don’t just face silencing at legacy media institutions. Alex Berenson was turfed off pre-Musk Twitter—a crippling sentence for a journalist—for publishing criticism and counterclaims about the government’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Ken Klippenstein published the manifesto by suspected killer Luigi Mangione and the J.D. Vance dossier when legacy media outlets refused, out of a belief that the documents served the public interest. He did so even while facing bans from X and Meta.

Matt Taibbi ran the original Twitter Files, shedding light on the government-backed censorship of that era. He was pilloried by the mainstream media for breaking this story, but rather than throwing in his lot with the other team, he ended up disagreeing with them too, and found himself shadow banned by X for his trouble.

Bans and boycotts are not the worst consequences for speaking your mind—a fact literary hero Salman Rushdie, who was violently attacked for his writing, understands all too well.

These are just a few examples of people of all political stripes who have risked real cost for telling the truth as they see it. You may not agree with all of their reporting or align with their perspectives—given the spread of their ideological bents, it would be impossible to do so. But we can admire the courage of their convictions and support their right to speak.

Elon Musk has been a vocal supporter of free speech. It’s no secret that we haven’t always seen eye to eye, but he deserves a lot of credit for advancing freedom of speech on X, before it was popular and in the face of fierce criticism and opposition. But Musk’s record is not perfect—he has been credibly accused of censoring his political opponents in addition to his commercial ones. Mark Zuckerberg recently announced favorable changes in policy for Meta that should result in freer expression on its platforms. His stated reasons were a change in public sentiment and a new administration, reflecting a real change in the culture. Those who welcome the press freedom changes at Meta owe a debt to those who took a principled stand when the wind was blowing the other way.

But just because the winds have changed does not mean we can now take freedom of the press for granted. In politics and business, it is easy to stand for free speech for your own side, but once given the power to censor, it is tempting to use it. President Trump campaigned on supporting free speech but has filed lawsuits against news outlets whose election coverage he didn’t like, raising questions about how consistent that support will be now that he’s in office.

At Substack, we remain committed to supporting everyone, from all tribes and persuasions, who flex their expressive rights on the platform. We deliberately built the platform in a way that ensures robust protections for expression. On Substack, the people who subscribe to you—not executives, activists, or advertisers—decide what kind of speech to support.

We will continue to support editorial freedom and the hands-off approach to content moderation that we have had in place since the company was founded in 2017. This does not mean anarchy or a descent into lowest-common-denominator shouting. Instead, it means that the people who use the platform get to set the rules for their own spaces on the internet.

And we have big plans to further bolster protections for a free press and freedom of expression on Substack. In addition to introducing more tools to allow Substack users and publishers to set their own terms of engagement on the platform, we will soon be announcing an expansion of the Substack Defender program, which includes a fund that offers legal support to independent writers who face intimidation and opposition from the subjects of their stories. We began the program five years ago, believing then, as we do now, that journalists cannot do their job if they face ruinous litigation and reprisals for reporting on powerful people in business and government.

As a platform, we are committed to supporting the speech rights of creators and their audiences, so we avoid political or business commitments that conflict with this mission. We buy into the old idea that we can strongly disagree with what someone has to say and still defend their right to say it.

We do this even when it is not convenient, and even when people criticize us. In this, we take inspiration from the many independent journalists, writers, and thinkers on Substack who have shown the way.