Democracy & Elections

The Lawfare Podcast: Lawfare Enters the Substack Discourse

Jen Patja, Quinta Jurecic, Jacob Schulz, Jacquelyn G. Schneider
Thursday, February 4, 2021, 12:00 PM

Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
Brookings

On this episode of Arbiters of Truth, Lawfare’s miniseries on disinformation and misinformation, Quinta Jurecic sat down with Lawfare’s deputy managing editor Jacob Schulz, and Jordan Schneider, host of the ChinaTalk podcast, to talk about Substack. The newsletter service is the new cool thing in the journalism world—and, like any newly popular online service, it is already running into questions around content moderation.


Jacob wrote about Substack’s content moderation policy earlier this month, and Jordan uses Substack to send out his ChinaTalk newsletter, so he filled us in on the platform’s nuts and bolts. Why is Substack so popular right now, anyway? Does it help writers step outside the unhealthy dynamics that help spread disinformation and discontent on social media, or does it just play into those dynamics further? And what might the platform’s content moderation policies leave to be desired?




Jen Patja is the editor and producer of the Lawfare Podcast and Rational Security. She currently serves as the Co-Executive Director of Virginia Civics, a nonprofit organization that empowers the next generation of leaders in Virginia by promoting constitutional literacy, critical thinking, and civic engagement. She is the former Deputy Director of the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier and has been a freelance editor for over 20 years.
Quinta Jurecic is a fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and a senior editor at Lawfare. She previously served as Lawfare's managing editor and as an editorial writer for the Washington Post.
Jacob Schulz is a law student at the University of Chicago Law School. He was previously the Managing Editor of Lawfare and a legal intern with the National Security Division in the U.S. Department of Justice. All views are his own.
Jacquelyn Schneider is a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University, a nonresident fellow at the Naval War College’s Cyber and Innovation Policy Institute, and a senior adviser to the Cyberspace Solarium Commission. She researches the intersection of technology, national security, and political psychology with a special interest in cyber, unmanned technologies, and wargaming. Her work has appeared in a variety of outlets, including Security Studies, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, the Journal of Strategic Studies, Foreign Affairs, Lawfare, War on the Rocks, the Washington Post and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. She has a bachelor of arts degree from Columbia University, a master of arts degree from Arizona State University and a doctorate from George Washington University.

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