Rebecca had always told herself she was one of the good ones.
She wasn’t a censor. She wasn’t a puppet.
She was here to protect the platform.
Keep people safe. Make fair calls. Be the balance between speech and harm.
But today, staring at the appeal she was about to deny, she didn’t feel like one of the good ones anymore.
It had started like any other takedown.
A name flagged. A flood of reports. The usual words:
Harassment. Bullying. Coordinated abuse.
Her job was to review the case and apply the standard.
She opened the flagged Substack.
Her eyes flicked over the content.
It wasn’t a hate screed.
It wasn’t inciting violence.
It wasn’t even personal attacks.
It was analysis. Documentation. A breakdown of patterns of manipulation.
A case study on how bad actors hijack reporting tools to silence critics.
She frowned.
This isn’t a violation.
So why were there dozens of identical reports, all filed within minutes of each other?
Her stomach twisted.
She’d seen this before.
This wasn’t a community protecting itself.
This was a coordinated takedown.
Rebecca had been here long enough to know how the game worked.
Moderation wasn’t about right or wrong. It was about optics.
A big account gets flagged? That’s a problem.
A journalist gets deplatformed? That’s a PR nightmare.
But a smaller writer? No one notices.
They disappear with a click.
Appeals came in all the time. Most were copy-pasted from people desperate to get their platforms back.
She used to read them.
Really read them.
But they never made a difference.
Once the system decided you were a problem, the appeal process wasn’t for reconsideration—it was for closure.
A way to make people feel like they had a last chance—even when the decision had already been made.
And that was the part that made her stomach turn.
Because she was part of that process.
She was the one rubber-stamping appeals into oblivion.
And she was about to do it again.
She hovered over the REJECT button.
The appeal was well-written. Rational. A plea, but not desperate.
It laid out evidence of mass reporting abuse.
It referenced Joel Johnson by name.
That made her pause.
She knew that name.
He had surfaced before—always in the periphery, never directly violating the rules, but always at the center of some orchestrated outrage.
She checked the logs.
The takedown happened faster than usual.
No warnings. No conversations. Just a wave of reports—then silence.
This isn’t a real violation.
She knew it.
But did that matter?
Did it ever?
She could approve the appeal.
She could push it back up the chain.
She could force someone higher up to make the final call.
But then what?
Her name would be attached to it.
Her judgment would be questioned.
Maybe she’d get a quiet warning about “not making things harder than they need to be.”
Maybe she’d be reassigned.
Maybe she’d just find herself left out of important meetings until she got the message.
She had seen it happen before.
To good people.
To people who thought their job was to make fair calls—not just easy ones.
Her cursor hovered over the decision.
Deny. Approve.
She had one moment of power.
One decision that could break the machine—or prove that it was unbreakable.
Her chest tightened.
And in that moment, Rebecca realized she wasn’t scared of the consequences.
She was scared of how easy it was to keep lying to herself.
To keep pretending she had no choice.
To keep pretending she was still one of the good ones.
She closed her eyes.
Clicked.
And decided who she really was.
Nick has seen this firestorm before. He just never thought Substack would be at the center of it.
🔥 EPISODE THREE: The PR Firewall (Nick T.)
Nick has been here before.
He knows what’s about to happen.
The execs will minimize. Then they’ll double down. Then, when it’s too late, they’ll come to him.
"Nick, we need a response."
A response that says nothing.
A response that changes nothing.
But Nick knows the real danger—this isn’t just a PR headache.
This is the moment Substack loses its credibility.
🔗 READ: The PR Firewall (Nick T.)
Neutralizing Narcissism: The Awakening Edition
