Free Speech, Substack and Medium.com

Adam Rothstein
3 min readJan 27, 2022

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Stripe logo with other brands

YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter were once the homes for free speech. Today that is not the case. These websites now censor people based on political affiliation or simply censor stories that they do not want anyone else to know. It is a shame that it has come to this. There are now many websites that have countered that.

Medium.com and Substack are just two websites that can help fight against censorship. On medium.com and Substack, users can create a profile, write articles and submit them for everyone who’s on the site to view. You may not get as much traffic as someone who’s already well-established with thousands of followers. But like building your audience up on Twitter, YouTube or Facebook, it takes time.

What makes Substack and medium.com interesting is that there’s no limit to how long your articles can be. You could make a two-hour article with a hundred thousand words or even just a two-minute audio clip. You can even make your post the length of a tweet if you don’t want to get too fancy.

Both medium.com and Substack have not had cause to sensor articles or anything controversial. I find it interesting that with all the censorship that these two sites have managed to steer clear from it,

I am grateful that both of these platforms exist, and without them, we would have never discovered certain things. And we may even be more in the dark in terms of the information we know about the world. We must maintain both of these sites as they are. We can’t allow any censorship on these platforms.

We must allow for controversial ideas, along with the happy articles and the feel-good articles.

With substack.com, you can import an email list. You can also have new users sign up for your email list from other platforms. You can email them directly through Substack once they are on your list.

The best part about using Substack is that not only can you email followers, but you can also have new users find it and give it a good read.

Medium works in a similar way. However, when you follow a user, you get new articles and alerts. If you had to ask me, I prefer the functionality of medium.com. However, on Substack, you can add a link to your podcast as well and have all the episodes imported to your Substack account or newsletter.

Podcasting is another way to fight against censorship. Having an audio format of what you want to say is always an excellent idea.

Once you have a distributor for your podcast, it can be submitted anywhere, including Apple, Spotify, Spreaker, Google podcast, and Castbox. If one platform decides to censor, you can still use a link from a different podcast for your Substack account.

You can also give those who are on the email list early access to your podcast. You can even start a business out of all of this by creating a paid subscription service. You can add your Stripe account to your Substack and send out emails exclusive for your paid readers.

Given all of the censorship happening today, there are still many ways to fight it. We must make sure that medium.com and Substack remain as free speech platforms. Because without these platforms, we lose our most basic human rights.

If you liked what you read here, please check out my podcasts, ‘The Blue Oasis Podcast’ and ‘The Goalie Kid.

The Blue Oasis Podcast: https://castbox.fm/channel/The-Blue-Oasis-Podcast-id4713881?country=us

The Goalie Kid: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Y84EvKjSR0zI1PSmm8q5u

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Adam Rothstein

Sports and tech writer. Lover of American sports stadiums.