Substack should stand up to Starmer's bullying
Do not kowtow to Morgan McSweeney
Regular readers, especially those living in Britain, will now be aware that Substack is automatically flagging J’accuse articles as ‘harmful content’ and is asking our subscribers to upload their identities to prove their age. Substack is not, as it promised, using paid subscribers details to allow them to bypass this paywall. This is to comply with the Online Safety Act (OSA) which came into effect in July of this year.
I do not expect my readers to go along with this, because much like them, I believe in internet anonymity and I do not trust my government not to store ‘who is reading what’ somewhere and then use it as evidence in a prosecution in ten to fifteen years. One of the many reasons that I do not trust any polling by orgnisations like YouGov on people’s attitudes towards immigration or questions of identity (‘can you be non-white and British?’) is that I would personally never give a third-party company a record that I held a heretical view on such a subject.
Nobody in Britain really believes that we live in a ‘free country’ anymore, because we manifestly do not, and it has been known since the NSA leaks that all online activity is clandestinely recorded by the American government, which could be taken over by vengeful Democrats in the near future, who will be able to conduct a campaign against ‘online hate’ with much more effectiveness than Britain’s incumbent government.
Right now there are two viable workarounds for British readers who do not want to give their information to a third party service which may be hacked by bad actors or our own government. They can receive their posts by email, or they can use a VPN service to get around the age-gate. I would suggest the latter action as a matter of basic hygiene and to enhance your experience of the internet as you will no longer be age-gated on other platforms.
The Telegraph recently ran an article on Substack’s decision to put one of Rod Dreher’s article behind an age-verification gate, in which a government spokesperson stated that Substack had misinterpreted the OS and that there was still ‘clear and unequivocal duties on platforms to protect freedom of expression’. Ofcom, a quango which has some enforcement powers related to the Online Safety Act, said that ‘there’s nothing in the Act that requires content that’s not harmful to children to be age-gated’.
It has been suggested by the government on a few different occasions that platforms are deliberately going too far with the implementation of the OSA. A cynical mind might suggest that platforms like X, Reddit and Substack are being heavy handed with this enforcement in order to stir up controversy about the legislation and generate some pushback. Though I am naturally given to conspiracy I do not believe this to be the case regarding Substack. It seems more likely that the extraordinary, brutal fines which the OSA is proposing for platforms who fail to comply (10% of global revenue) is intimidating Substack and other companies into being overly zealous in enforcing the law. I put the blame for this squarely at the feet of Starmer.
Our paid subscriptions, maddeningly, have been stagnant since Substack started doing this, I assume because our paid subscribers are receiving articles and then being asked to hand over their identity documents. This is especially annoying given that we are still within touching distance of 500 paid subscribers and Christmas is usually our best time for growth.
I never ask for sympathy, I only point this out to explain that this legislation is now directly hurting us commercially. Which is, after all, the point. The OSA was never about protecting children, it was designed to crush alternative media. This is exactly what Morgan McSweeney - one of the principle architects of this legislation through his involvement with the Centre for Countering Digital Hate - did to left-wing media outlets such as the Canary when he was working for the Labour Party in opposition.
In its original form, the Online Safety Act explicitly distinguished between restrictions on official publishers (e.g mainstream media websites) and alternative media sources. Some liberally minded MPs in the Tory party successfully fought a rear-guard action against how the OSA was worded, but as we can now clearly see, the assurances that were given at the time that the OSA would not impact free speech were not worth the paper they were written on.
I will always reserve a special hatred for the ‘Conservatives’ who, it must be remembered, drafted this legislation and then believed the false assurances about free speech protections, and an admiration for the tiny number of mainstream voices which opposed it. As the Dragon has noted, the disparagement of ‘libertarianism’ and civil liberties as a loony pursuit is one of the most sinister changes in political discourse in our lifetimes. You cannot be a ‘conservative’, in Britain, to employ the tedious semantic argument, if you do not stand up for personal liberty against an encroaching state. Britain as a historical entity ceases to exist when it is no longer free. In this respect it has almost been dead since the Race Relations Act was passed in 1976. It is the job of ‘conservatives’ to resurrect real Britain, not help defend the stinking corpse it has become by enabling clampdowns on dissident thought.
We are not some tawdry Eastern European Catholic despotism and I would sooner see the star and crescent fly from the Houses of Parliament than have it ruled by brainless MPs who believe that their husband watching pornography instead of having sex with them is cause for destroying the liberalisation of communications that the internet represents.
American readers. Please do not, even for a second, think that your First Amendment protections will prevent this from happening to you. A quick browse of your congressional website draws up plenty of bills that are currently in progress to introduce age-gating on the internet. States like Texas have already introduced age-gating for ‘online pornography’ under the aegis of protecting children. It is true that in Britain you can be arrested for tweeting in a way that Americans are not, but you do not need to arrest your political enemies to silence them. You can simply drive them out of business.
The promise of the internet was that it would allow us to sidestep broken institutions and speak to each other directly. That mainstream media organisations, which discriminate against radical opinions or white men in their hiring decisions, would no longer have the ability to gatekeep the information environment. It is this transformation which explains all of the political progress that the right has made since the 1990s, manifesting itself in moments like the election of Donald Trump and Brexit.
It is this process that hollow men like Morgan McSweeney are targeting when they encourage the implementation of this legislation. And it is this process which Substack, as an organisation embodies. It is the spirit of the institution, which was designed to give writers direct access to their audiences instead of having to work through intermediaries.
It is my hope that Substack, a platform to which I owe much and I feel fondness towards, finds the moral courage to stand up to this bullying by my government.