When it was announced that Elon Musk might be taking over Twitter, a representative of Substack said they were hiring, and if you were leaving Twitter “because you’re worried about Elon Musk pushing for less regulated speech,” “please do not come work here.” We’ve done quite a few posts on how Substack has become the bad boy of the self-publishing world because “it’s a threat to journalism” and “right-wing culture warriors” like Bari Weiss and Glenn Greenwald and Jesse Singal were using it to organize harassment campaigns. Besides, why were anti-vaccine newsletters even “allowed to exist” on Substack? Don’t they moderate content over there? In other words, libs were freaking out over Substack when Twitter was still theirs to control.
Jeryl Bier has another great find from Nina Jankowicz, the head of the Biden administration’s new “Disinformation Governance Board.” We checked out freelance writer Elise Thomas’ Twitter feed, and man, does she tweet a lot about QAnon.
If you're a prominent spreader of Covid-19 misinfo, QAnon or white nationalism who wants to reach an audience (and be paid by them) without pesky content moderation, where do you go?
Increasingly, the answer seems to be Substack. Here's me for @ISDglobal https://t.co/IfBFTbvV0N
— Elise Thomas (@elisethoma5) January 17, 2022
Jankowicz thanked Thomas for her important piece and said she was moving her own newsletter off of Substack:
Thanks for this important piece, @elisethoma5. The platforming of extremists and purveyors of disinformation is one of the big reasons I moved my (small, but I like to think mighty) newsletter to Revue. https://t.co/ukYqZKSB8q
— Nina Jankowicz 🇺🇦🇺🇸 (@wiczipedia) January 17, 2022
Boy, does she hate disinformation, like that Hunter Biden laptop story.
Wow. In January, Nina Jankowicz, head of the Biden administration's new "Disinformation Governance Board," said that she left @SubstackInc because the company was "platforming… extremists and purveyors of disinformation". https://t.co/DFjA2xMrUh pic.twitter.com/sv5WRvuU6M
— Jeryl Bier (@JerylBier) April 28, 2022
Curious if Substack, @lulumeservey, has any comment about Nina Jankowicz's appointment to the government's Disinformation Governance Board? pic.twitter.com/zk7ztymYIo
— Jeryl Bier (@JerylBier) April 28, 2022
Funny that this new board would pop up just as Musk suggested he was going to try to make Twitter politically neutral.
It makes one think about why @wiczipedia was selected by #Biden to lead the new Ministry of Propaganda. What is her mandate?
— John K (@PeakMojo) April 28, 2022
This needs to be put on blast
— arianna (@socialrefusenik) April 28, 2022
And Revue had *fewer* misinformation controls.
It was all posturing. By a prominent misinformation purveyor now in charge of determining "truth."
No one should listen to her, and that board must be disbanded yesterday.
— Jeff Weimer (@Jeff_Weimer) April 28, 2022
Agreed. We’d be curious to know Jankowicz’s definition of “extremist.”
Related:
Jen Psaki isn’t sure who opposes the Biden administration’s new effort to prevent disinformation from spreading https://t.co/7rjLOS4pvN
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) April 28, 2022
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