How Substack's Algorithmic Censorship Is Suppressing My Work

And what users can do about it (Recording at the end)

Photo by ayumi kubo on Unsplash

Occasionally, I use a newsletter to give an update on all the latest tech-bro censorship tactics, the user experience at Substack, and where I’m trying to go from here.

If you’re a Substack user, this newsletter is for YOU.

Imagine you mail a letter. You believe the letter will reach its destination, because you’ve lived with a postal service whose unofficial motto is Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

When you don’t hear anything from the letter’s recipient, you assume they don’t want to correspond with you. You’re hurt, but you don’t try again. Instead, you go on with your life.

Only unbeknownst to you and your entire community, your local mail carrier has been hoarding undelivered mail in his basement. FOR YEARS.

This mail carrier - we could call him THE ALGORITHM - trapped your letter in his basement - the BLACK BOX - and severed your connection with a friend - or on Substack, your SUBSCRIBERS/FOLLOWERS.

Billionaires are aggressively censoring progressive voices - including on Substack. Algorithms should be called what they are - CENSORSHIP.

Here’s what that censorship looks like on my Substack.

Paid subscribers tell me they aren’t receiving my emails. Many have unsubscribed because of failed email delivery.

This could be caused by several things. PLEASE go through these steps and do what you can to ensure you’re receiving emails you want - not only from me, but from anyone.

1. Make sure you OPEN each Substack newsletter you’re subscribed to. You may not have time to read it, but at least OPEN it. This will train your email program to keep sending these newsletters to your main inbox instead of your spam folder.

2. Check your spam folders regularly. It isn’t uncommon for newsletters to be sent to spam, especially if a user doesn’t open it regularly. Rescuing subscribed newsletters from spam will train the program not to spam them again.

3. Stop using free US email services like Gmail. I’ve been begging Americans to quit Gmail since the November 2024 election. The billionaire owners of Google and similar companies are ALL IN on fascism. It’s kindergarten-level programming to create rules that will never deliver emails with certain keywords like abortion, fascism, Christian Nationalism, LGBTQIA+, immigration protest, and more. By continuing to use these services, you are missing crucial information AND you are allowing these people to feed your preferences straight into your Palantir profile. STOP USING GMAIL. JUST STOP IT.

4. Keep a separate list of your paid subscriptions. I do this in my private (NOT GOOGLE) calendar. I know every sub I have and when it renews. If I miss a few emails, this system reminds me to look for them. Plus, I can leave auto-renew on for each author and use reminders to decide whether I want to renew. (Substack counts “turning off auto-renew” as an unsubscribe.)

5. Substack doesn’t send notifications about my LIVEs or sends them too late for subscribers to join. I’m not sure how to fix this problem, but I want to make subscribers aware of it. I believe it is an overall piece of their algorithmic censorship model, and I don’t want to overwhelm subscribers with even more emails/notifications to try to counter it. Every Monday, I give a rundown of events. If you see something you want to attend, put it on your calendar. You can join live events even if you don’t receive notifications from Substack. My lives run at the top of my homepage.

Algorithmic censorship also targets messy email lists.

In an effort to tackle this problem, I scrubbed over 8,000 inactive emails this week. It should improve my open and engagement rates, which should improve my algorithmic performance.

I’m not holding my breath.

I also discovered how many bot farm accounts operate on Substack. The country of Nigeria went from hundreds of subscribers to twelve. Russia and China were both reduced to ONE subscriber. These bot farms operate in part to suppress open rates and diminish the performance of targeted information in the algorithm.

Having said that, I’D LOVE IT IF YOU’D BECOME A NEWSLETTER SUBSCRIBER!

I have almost 70,000 Substack followers. Only a fraction subscribe to this newsletter. It’s crucial to subscribe TO NEWSLETTERS because:

1. Substack’s shift toward notes and the newsfeed makes everything temporary. I can no longer scroll more than a couple of months into my notes’ history to find things. Newsletters and long-form pieces are more permanent. Users can download them. Save them. Screenshot them. It’s a better way to preserve information in the event certain users can no longer access Substack.

2. Substack has throttled discovery of my Substack. Again, this is algorithmic censorship. Before I purged inactive emails, my subscriber count had been stalled for over a year. Substack’s discovery features buried me in March 2025. I went from getting hundreds of new subscribers per day to single digits. While it’s tough to overcome being put in a black box, your SHARES, RE-STACKS, and especially GIFTS and LEADERBOARD SUBSCRIPTIONS help more people find this work.

3. Always click LIKE on a newsletter, even if the topic is tough. I click LIKE to show fellow Substackers I read their work. It’s giving them love.

Paid Subscribers, I have reactivated my Fast Alert channel. It transcends algorithms and delivers an alert to your phone every time I publish a newsletter. It is hosted outside the US and can be repurposed if this Substack goes offline.

PLEASE SIGN UP FOR MY FAST ALERT CHANNEL TODAY.

The link to subscribe is below today’s paywall. This feature is limited to Paid Subscribers because it is totally anonymous. It doesn’t collect any identifying details about YOU, the user. To keep it a safe space, I must limit it to those who support this work financially. If you’d like to sign up, click the button below and Upgrade to Paid.

You don’t want to support Substack’s billionaire owners and avoid paid subscriptions. But you want to support individual Substackers’ work.

Many Substackers include tip jars or outside links in every newsletter. I’ve always chosen to route my subscriptions through Substack and encourage users to “tip” with a one-month subscription ($8).

(I do not like referring to my newsletters as “content,” because it diminishes the value of good information. Likewise, I don’t ask for “tips,” because it reduces the time and effort surrounding this work to something optional. People who can afford to support good information SHOULD SUPPORT IT. Period.)

However, I share my Venmo account with users who want to pay outside of Substack. I then comp those subscribers with paid subs. The Venmo system isn’t perfect, and it won’t work forever (the same dreadful billionaires own the bulk of it), but please send me a direct message if you prefer to pay by Venmo.

Because this update is getting lengthy, I’ll publish a separate newsletter on my offshore-my-Substack progress over the weekend. It’s a lot. Please don’t miss it!

Thank you for supporting this work. This Fast Alert channel transcends Substack and email algorithms that could suppress delivery of this work, both now and in the future.

PLEASE SIGN UP, even if you think it’s overkill today.

As NSPM-7 is implemented, a tool like Fast Alert will protect you from targeting. You can unsubscribe from email messages that can be tracked and still receive information. The government can come after me (or any other producer), but they cannot see who is subscribed to my Fast Alert channel. I can’t even see who’s subscribed. It doesn’t collect any identifying information on YOU, the user.

We can redirect this Fast Alert channel to my EU-based platform once we finally get it up and running.

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