Capitalist Havens of Free Speech: Market-driven innovation is providing new outlets for free expression in an increasingly intolerant media environment

Even before Twitter banned Donald Trump and Amazon stopped hosting the social media site Parler on its web services, free-speech controversies had been regularly erupting at newspapers, magazines, websites, and book publishers. Notable recent cases involved high-profile journalists decamping from their established media homes to independent platforms where they could express themselves freely. The departures, under pressure, of Matt Yglesias last November from the website Vox, which he cofounded, and Andrew Sullivan in July from New York, where he was one of the magazine’s most popular writers, made them fellow travelers with a more conservative journalist, Bari Weiss, who left the New York Times last summer, saying, “If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome.”

Capitalist Havens of Free Speech: Market-driven innovation is providing new outlets for free expression in an increasingly intolerant media environment Free-speech-havens

Capitalist Havens of Free Speech: Market-driven innovation is providing new outlets for free expression in an increasingly intolerant media environment Free-speech-havens

Many on the right have seen these departures as examples of a troubling clampdown on free speech, but some progressives dismissed the moves as opportunistic; Sullivan and others have won large readerships at their new homes, they noted. After political scientist Yascha Mounk tweeted support for Yglesias’s move, New York Times tech reporter Mike Isaac countered that Mounk “conveniently ignores the fact that people w/large followings are making bank by jumping ship.”

True enough. After Sullivan left New York, he quickly attracted some 60,000 subscribers to his new newsletter on the independent online platform Substack; he more than doubled the income he was earning at the magazine, he said. One media critic described Sullivan’s success as “gut curdling” to other journalists. Substack reportedly recruited Yglesias, offering him a hefty advance to join after news of his clashes within Vox emerged. Among the other popular features on Substack are Mounk’s free-speech newsletter Persuasion, which aims “to persuade, rather than to mock or troll, those who disagree with us” and gained about 25,000 subscribers just weeks after it debuted in April 2020; and former Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi’s widely read media criticism, published under the rubric TK News.

None of these voices has faced any threat to their speech from government, which is, of course, what the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects citizens from. Instead, they have confronted a pervasive new menace: a cultural shift in key elite institutions, especially the media (including social media) and academia, which have made many recently acceptable, even anodyne, opinions suddenly forbidden. The punishment for expressing these beliefs is to get pushed out of those institutions and lose one’s livelihood. Yet new platforms like Substack are emerging as an antidote to such cultural and economic banishment, even if they were not originally designed to become free-speech havens but rather a means of expanding economic opportunity—to give people more choices in how to earn a living.

.https://www.city-journal.org/capitalist-havens-of-free-speech

Capitalist Havens of Free Speech: Market-driven innovation is providing new outlets for free expression in an increasingly intolerant media environment

Capitalist Havens of Free Speech: Market-driven innovation is providing new outlets for free expression in an increasingly intolerant media environment

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