They didn’t want you to read this.

A reckoning between content creators, consumers and the middlemen is upon us.

After months of chest-thumping over how his acquisition of Twitter would turn the microblogging site into a bastion of free speech, Twitter's CEO Elon Musk reversed course.

It turns out that when the chips are down, in Musk's Twitterland, it's free speech for me, not for thee.

For a roughly 48-hour period over the weekend, Elon Musk's Twitter aggressively suppressed the publication of links to content posted on the popular newsletter platform Substack. The move was viewed as so draconian that it prompted prominent independent journalist Matt Tabibi, who just weeks ago collaborated with Musk on releasing the so-called "Twitter files," to call Musk out and abandon Twitter.

It’s easy to brush off Musk's decision as yet another example of the increasingly erratic CEO’s mercurial management style. But Twitter's suppression of Substack articles is part of a broader movement in the media to use censorship as a lazy way to preserve corporate profit instead of innovating to solve foundational business problems. In suppressing Substack content, Musk did the same thing that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is doing to Canadians more broadly via controversial bills C-11 and C-18 - regulating the type of content Canadians will or won't see.

And that’s bullshit. In the information age, technology should enable people to have access to more diverse sources of information, not less. That’s why people need to care about this.

Increasingly, algorithm-reliant social media platforms like Facebook, legacy broadcasters, and traditional content creation agencies see censorship as an easy way to sustain shareholder value. This phenomenon is happening because their businesses have failed to adapt to disruptive technology, changing consumer appetites, and the pace of development of competitors. 

Take Musk's Twitter, for example. Having largely failed to address usability problems that plague the site, the value of Musk's Twitter is reported to have dropped a staggering 50% in two months as user traffic - and thus advertising revenue - has waned on the bot-infested, harassment-fueled platform. Instead of working first to solve these problems, derive value from Substack users on Twitter, or develop a superior product, Musk opted for the slapdash route to appease investors - content censorship.

For Trudeau's part, controversial Canadian bills C-11 and C-18 were written in response to a massive lobbying effort by still politically influential but financially faltering legacy print media outlets who have yet to figure out how to replace the revenue generated from print advertising. The same goes for Canada's bloated and increasingly irrelevant public broadcaster who, with few notable exceptions, has never figured out how to produce self-sustaining content. Even Canada's privately held broadcasters are arguably only profitable in a highly government-regulated system that is hinged upon censoring the rise of competitors. 

In all these cases, instead of adapting to change, a few powerful people in the executive suites of these corporations are relying on their lobbyists to convince the government to facilitate the censorship of competitive content in favour of restricting the public's access to content that financially benefits their shareholders. With the side benefit of having more government control over what the public sees, the Trudeau Liberals have been more than happy to oblige.

Fortunately, technological development and innovation in content creation and dissemination are outpacing the speed of bureaucracy and corporate executive incompetence in legacy media platforms. 

Take Substack, for example. You are reading this newsletter on the Substack platform, which has seen explosive growth over the last two years. Substack's business model is predicated on exploiting critical weaknesses that exist between content creators and legacy platforms - most notably, the need for direct contact between creators and their audiences.

To illustrate, compare how Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok (algorithm-reliant platforms) operate compared to emerging platforms like Substack. Substack-like platforms allows creators to have the ability to contact each of their followers directly. But a content creator on an algorithm-reliant platform cannot directly communicate en-masse with their followers because those platforms can only create revenue if they have the power to act as a middleman in deciding who sees what. 

Worse still, on those platforms, a creator is entirely at the mercy of an artificial intelligence-based algorithm to show their content to their followers, and therefore must create content that gets them the most views in the context of the algorithm.

This operating reality puts the creator in a death-spiral where they have to tailor their content to the algorithm for it to be distributed, not to their desired audience or what they actually want to say. If that algorithm wants angry shouty stuff, but the creator wants to do something different, there’s no incentive for them to do so. The same is true the other way, too. Algorithm-reliant platforms have complete power to decide what content a user can see, even if they want to see something different than what the algorithm has decided that they should see.

It isn't a stretch to say this is analogous to a talent agency using the casting couch to decide which actor gets the starring role in a movie.  

Now, a private sector corporation like Twitter will do what it will to make profit, and Substack is still young enough that they may yet screw it up too. But increasingly, there are signs consumers want something different. With direct-contact platforms like Substack and other start-up independent media sites, a user is empowered to choose exactly what content they want to see by consenting to subscribe to a creator. The creator gets their contact information, and the creator's content gets dropped directly into their inbox.

Intermediaries, or gatekeepers, and their artificial intelligence algorithms are avoided. If the user values the content, they'll keep their subscription active. If they don't, they can unsubscribe. Rather than an algorithms and the corporations that own them making that decision, humans do.

This phenomenon is now being described as the emergence of subscriber networks that may outpace the growth of stagnant social networks.

This change has the potential to ease the negative toll opaque social media algorithms - often designed to calcify extreme positions - have taken on political discourse, culture, and science. But it also has the potential to disrupt the profitability of algorithm-reliant platforms. So it's no wonder that governments eager to control political messages and algorithm-reliant platforms eager to retain lucrative influence over content creation, distribution, and consumption, desperately want to shut down this emerging revolution.

For several years now, as an elected representative, I have become increasingly uncomfortable and frustrated with playing the "satisfy-the-algorithm" game while praying that legacy media will afford me airtime to get action on issues of relevance to my community. Over the last year, the decision to write long-form articles on a platform like Substack has forced me to bring more nuance and context to communicate the often complex issues I need to address as a legislator. It also provides an insurance policy against any efforts to de-platform me. This newsletter has nearly 30,000 subscribers now, with each article posted to it now being read upwards of 50,000 times. This means I’m talking directly to more people about policy, and this is a good thing.

For other types of content creators, less reliance on algorithms and legacy media has allowed independent journalists to monetize their work, perhaps more lucratively than what’s on offer at traditional print outlets, and to find new audiences. Canadian journalists Paul Wells, Jen Gerson, Matt Gurney, and Justin Ling are incredibly positive examples of this.

With no algorithm to satisfy, these platforms also allow for more nuance in thought. They also can more easily allow marginalized voices to build a platform.

In the information age, no one, regardless of political stripe, should be comfortable with allowing a CEO like Musk, or the executives of legacy broadcasters like the CBC, and a potential cabal of all-too-willing politicians to dictate public discourse and who can profit from content creation via censorship bills and the perpetuation of opaque, artificial intelligence algorithms. 

We should be embracing a renaissance of communication between humans, not hindering it.

Based on Musk's rapid reversal of his Substack suppression and the mass outrage that followed bills C-11 and C-18, long term, I'm confident freedom of speech and creativity will emerge victorious.

But that’s really up to you, isn’t it?