An Important Note to Subscribers
Substack has rendered me almost invisible on their platform — and I don't know why.
Update 7.25.2023: After contacting Substack and writing this post, staff from Substack began to help me sort through the nonsense of being made invisible on the platform. I was told that my blog had been erroneously classified as “spam” by Substack’s filtering systems. After a spirited debate about the dubious ethics and deceptiveness of shadow-banning practices, my Substack profile was finally visible to the public again, and I was finally showing up in the public search again, by late evening on July 24. No explanation was ever provided to me for the mysterious unsubscribes.
Yesterday afternoon, it came to my attention that I had been automatically unsubscribed as a reader from about 15 Substack publications that I had previously subscribed to. They were unrelated in their content, ranging from a natural wine blog to a legal scholar whose work focuses on age discrimination, an illustrator of wildlife, two anti-censorship activists and two acclaimed left-leaning journalists known for their adversarial coverage of the status quo.
All were unpaid subscriptions — the small handful of my paid subscriptions remained intact. Oddly, a few unpaid subscriptions also remained intact as well. I have no idea how, or why, it happened, but it was definitely odd (and annoying).
After re-subscribing to as many publications as I could remember having been subscribed to, I notified some of the writers about what happened. When writers are trying to build up their audience (and writing career) on Substack, the last thing they want — or need — is to have readers get unsubscribed out of nowhere, without any explanation as to what happened. I felt I had an obligation to let them know, since some writers’ livelihoods depend on this platform. I also notified Substack about the issue via Notes (no one wants their subscription-based platform to start randomly unsubscribing readers from publications).
It was then brought to my attention by one of those writers that my Substack profile had been rendered invisible on the Substack platform — along the same lines of a shadow ban. When that writer saw my comment on their article letting them know what happened and tapped on my name to view my profile (which is how readers would discover my blog and subscribe to it), all that showed up was a message saying: “Profile not found. We couldn’t load this profile.”
Oddly, on my end, everything looked normal.
Curious to know whether this was a universal experience for people trying to view my Substack profile, I visited the Substack website via private browser, where I wasn’t logged in, and searched for my Substack profile. Surprisingly, I saw exactly what the other writer saw — Substack had rendered my profile, which is how potential subscribers would discover my blog after interacting with me in comments or on Notes, essentially invisible to other writers and potential subscribers.
Perplexed, I wondered if anyone was at least able to search for me on Substack by my name — something else the writer had mentioned was broken when it came to finding me on the platform. Once again, when I was logged out, it was impossible to find me via search on Substack. I was essentially invisible to potential subscribers — I basically didn’t exist on the platform.
Finally, I decided to search for my name by post on Substack while logged out. Surely if I typed in “Erin Marie Miller” — in quotation marks to limit the search to that exact phrase — all of the posts I’ve written on Substack would show up, right?
No such luck. Instead, when I searched for posts by “Erin Marie Miller,” only posts by a writer named Erin Reed showed up — that’s not even close to my name.
Thankfully, my actual blog still shows up in search when you search for “Erin Marie Miller” by publication — even though searching for me by profile or posts yields no results.
I have no idea why this happened. Looking back at the posts I’ve written on Substack, I have not violated the platform’s Terms of Use or Content Guidelines in any way that I can discern. Any comments I’ve left on other writers’ posts, and any Notes I have posted, have been unfailingly respectful to others, and any information I’ve shared on the platform can be independently verified with credible official sources (I’m notoriously neurotic about accuracy and very open to corrections if I get something wrong).
Off Substack, I’m an experienced local journalist whose work has earned accolades from the Society of Professional Journalists. My work is taken seriously by my colleagues. As a reporter, my work is always respectful, though skeptical and cautious — as it should be (you can view my journalism credo here and my professional journalism portfolio here).
As part of my work as a journalist, I’m a frequent Freedom of Information Act requester — which has certainly ruffled the feathers of some government officials in recent years (especially when it comes to my ongoing FOIA litigation against the State of Michigan), but it has also ensured that everything I report is accurate and based on independently verifiable public records, rather than others’ potentially shoddy reporting processes, anonymous sources or agenda-laden opinions.
That said, I’ve emailed Substack to request an explanation for the mysterious un-subscriptions, and to demand the company make me whole on their platform so that all Substack users can view my profile and publication. I’m waiting to hear back. I also called the issue out on Notes and tagged everyone I could find at Substack, although I’m not sure if anyone other than myself can see it on the platform.
Still, I wanted my readers to be aware this happened, because it’s not insignificant. If you’ve had any trouble receiving my newsletter emails or viewing my Notes or articles on Substack, please reach out to me — that’s something I need to know about. You can contact me by replying to this email, or via any of the methods listed on my website’s contact page.
Finally, if you’re a writer on Substack, you should take time to log out and search for your Substack profile in a private browser on the platform to make sure this isn’t also happening to you (if it is, please contact me).
I’ll update everyone when/if I’m able to get this nonsense sorted out with Substack.
— em
Hello! A friend of mine happened to text me this and I messaged the team; it appears you were caught in an automatic spam filter. It’s hard to get them to work well with no false positives, but nothing is more excruciating than causing stress and worry for writers and interfering with their relationship with their readers; it’s literally what we exist to fight.
I’m very sorry for the stress and frustration, and that it was so difficult to get this remediated. The team works learnings like this into the automated systems, so hopefully this will mean less error in the future, but again, we’re very sorry for the inconvenience and bother. It’s awful. You should be set now.
I like that you're so persistent, Erin, in clarifying why Substack shadow-banned you. Bravo!