Newton’s decision to take newsletter off Substack

Oliver Darcy of CNN takes a look at Casey Newton‘s decision to take his tech newsletter Platformer off of Substack and Twitter/X.

Darcy writes, “For a journalist whose job it is to call out other companies for maintaining questionable business relationships, Newton said it would have not only been ethically dubious for him to ignore the decisions X and Substack were making, but hypocritical as well.

“‘I am writing all the time about how companies are failing to live up to their stated values,’ Newton told me. ‘And then here I am on these platforms overrun by far-right actors, transphobes, those who traffic in anti-LGBTBQ rhetoric — and so, given a large part about what Platformer is, our readers are going to hold us to a high standard.’

“Newton’s moves have caught the eye of the journalistic community for their bold and principled nature. They have also raised questions about whether establishment newsrooms, which have far more scale and resources than independent publishers, should take similar stands and be more judicious about the relationships they maintain. Outside NPR, which stopped posting on X last year, major news organizations have continued publishing their content to Musk’s social platform, despite his open and repugnant anti-press conduct.”

Read more here.