Sarah had tried.
She had tried to warn them.
Months ago.
She had seen the problem coming before it ever reached their inboxes.
Before the first big takedown.
Before the first wave of public backlash.
Before the first time someone inside the company had whispered the words:
"Maybe we got this one wrong."
Sarah had spent enough time in Trust & Safety to know one thing for certain—
Every system can be exploited.
It didn’t matter how well it was designed.
It didn’t matter how well-intentioned it was.
If there was a loophole, a flaw, a blind spot, someone would find it.
And once they did?
They would use it.
Sarah had watched it happen again and again.
First with automated moderation.
Then with mass reporting loopholes.
Then with AI-driven flagging tools.
Every single time, bad actors adapted faster than the system itself.
And Substack?
She had seen it in the patterns.
The way certain accounts got flagged faster.
The way mass reporting incidents spiked in predictable waves.
The way certain bad-faith actors figured out exactly how to frame their reports to trigger automatic action.
And the worst part?
The people being targeted weren’t the abusers.
They were the ones calling out the abuse.
Sarah had compiled reports.
She had flagged anomalies.
She had taken everything to leadership and said, "This is a problem."
She had expected resistance.
She had expected pushback.
What she hadn’t expected was silence.
She still remembered the exact moment she knew they weren’t going to listen.
A closed-door meeting.
A table full of decision-makers.
A screen displaying her data—the patterns, the warnings, the clear proof that they were letting bad actors game the system.
And the response?
"We’ll look into it."
"We trust our moderation team."
"These cases are complicated."
The conversation had ended with a PR-safe non-answer:
"We need to be careful about overcorrecting."
And Sarah had walked out of the room knowing—
Nothing was going to change.
The takedown had already happened.
The public pressure was already building.
She had seen Nick’s email.
She had seen the nervous conversations happening in Slack threads they thought she wasn’t reading.
She had seen the shift—
The realization that they were losing control of the narrative.
And now?
Now, they would scramble.
Now, they would look for a way to justify the decision, rather than admit they had been played.
Now, they would double down.
Because if they didn’t?
It wouldn’t just be this one case.
It would be all of them.
Every writer who had ever been suspended.
Every journalist who had ever been flagged.
Every person who had ever been silenced without due process.
If they admitted this one was wrong?
It meant questioning every decision they had ever made.
And that?
That was something they would never do.
She could stay quiet.
She could let them handle it.
She could watch as they made the same mistake she had tried to warn them about.
Or—
She could do something else.
She could talk.
She could make sure that when this all blew up—
And it would blow up.
She wasn’t on the wrong side of it.
Sarah closed her laptop.
Took a deep breath.
And made a decision.
She wasn’t going to sit this one out.
She had spent too long watching the wrong people win.
Not this time.
Not anymore.
Jessica isn’t just moderating content. She’s watching a platform lose its soul in real time.
💔 EPISODE FIVE: The Breaking Point (Jessica M.)
Jessica joined Substack because she believed in free speech.
Now, she moderates content she knows isn’t violating any rules.
Now, she watches good writers disappear, while bad actors hijack the system.
Now, she has to ask herself: Am I protecting the platform? Or am I protecting a lie?
🔗 READ: The Breaking Point (Jessica M.)
Neutralizing Narcissism: The Awakening Edition
