https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5d3988/free-speech-bastion-substack-fires-editor-for-editing-a-blog-critical-of-substack

In late July, the journalist Sam Thielman, who’d been working on contract as an editor for Substack, the newsletter company, was fired. As he would explain in a newsletter published earlier this week that described the firing as an act of retaliation, and as Substack would quickly acknowledge—”We fucked up” is the way founder Hamish McKenzie put it—he not only hadn’t done anything wrong, he hadn’t really done anything at all.

The episode ended well enough for Thielman, with him being paid for the work he would have done if he hadn’t been fired and Substack apologizing, but raised—hardly for the first time—a number of questions the company hasn’t been able to convincingly answer. Most of them have to do with what Substack, which at times seems to operate as a mission-driven journalistic outlet and at others as a neutral tech platform, actually is.