Nilay Patel

Here’s a good piece in the New York Times about China’s homegrown electric car companies, which are actually shipping lots of cars people are buying, instead of endlessly launching vaporware. Anyway, this paragraph is so deeply revealing: it contains so many solutions to transportation problems. A small gas generator in a popular battery electric car to solve for range anxiety and bullet trains! Imagine.

Mike Masnick at Techdirt has been writing about free speech and content moderation for ages, and this is about as clear an analysis as you’ll get.

It just usually goes a lot better than it did with Substack’s Chris Best. For example, I really enjoyed this episode with Matt Mullenweg, who is the CEO of both Wordpress and Tumblr, which got pretty far down the path of where the rules should come from. Or here’s Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, on how to properly regulate platforms. Maybe more than any podcast Decoder is the place to get all the way into the weeds of what various tradeoffs actually mean!

There’s only so much context you can put in a TikTok clip, but I really encourage you to listen to the entire 60-minute conversation with Substack CEO Chris Best that includes this exchange— we went pretty deep on Substack’s business, Twitter vs Substack, and, of course, what kind of moderation expectations people should have for Substack Notes, which looks a lot like a social network.

Here’s, uh, Fox News taking Elon to task for turning his back on free speech on Twitter, without any mention that his promises were always nonsensical and whatever perceived betrayals occurred were inevitable. I told you so.

Twitter is now threat-selling verification, which is very funny.

Searching for “Substack” still results in a search for “newsletter,” though. This is the dumbest chapter in content moderation history.

Imagine being the engineer assigned to being this much of a baby! I discovered it because it’s implemented so bluntly: even the word “substack” in a URL slug is blocked, so searching for this piece this morning didn’t work. Truly, this is free speech at its most democratic.