Big Internet is Censoring The Westrn. Here’s How to Help

A letter from the editors

The press is easier to strangle than look in the eyes. - Winston Churchill

It’s been three days since our soft launch.

So far, we’re feeling the love big time. Our community showed up for us before we gave it anything to show up for. We haven’t even published our first real story yet, at least not as the reinvented five-person rodeo that The Westrn has become in recent weeks. 

But something else is happening that won’t come as a shock to anyone familiar with sharing posts and stories about killing a wild animal for food on the internet.

After we posted our various announcements on Tuesday, a few rockstar friends and colleagues attempted to help us spread the word by tagging us in posts and sharing a subscription link to The Westrn on their Instagram stories. If you were one of them, you probably failed. That’s okay. We failed too, and we appreciate your effort. But somewhere in Pandora’s box of the Meta algorithm, our limited content about hunting is likely triggering a pain point and, thus, preventing us from promoting ourselves. 

For some of us, this looked like a red error bar at the bottom of our stories telling us the upload failed. Clicking on that red bar revealed a vague warning about certain sensitive types of content.

In some cases, our Substack link triggered the warning, and other times tagging @the.westrn did it. We can’t post our links on Facebook, and both Facebook and Instagram have removed multiple posts and stories.

There are likely a few variables at play. One is the set of murky content guidelines that companies train their employees and their algorithms on. We think Nicole’s post, titled “Killing Animals Helped Me Make Peace with Death” might be the culprit. Beyond that, maybe Meta doesn’t want us redirecting eyeballs to content on a different platform. Or maybe we caught the Meta algorithm on a bad day. But, since troubleshooting problems with social media reach is like trying to hit a moving bullseye blindfolded, we can only hypothesize for now. 

Rebels with a Cause

So yeah, it sucks. But we also find it motivating. Luckily, an integral part of The Westrn’s roadmap is a big, fat detour around relying on social media for community-building.

Social media has long provided a fantastic place for us to connect with strangers, broaden our worldviews, share information, celebrate wins, mourn losses, and speak truth to power. But as of late, it also increasingly builds fences between society’s ever-evolving definitions of acceptable and unacceptable behavior. It should come as no surprise that the practice and pursuit of hunting falls on the darker side of that fence.

It’s not just us; this has happened across the outdoor media. Social media is now keeping many narratives from entering public discourse. It’s affected war reporters, sex educators, and mental health professionals. In the hunting and angling media, we’ve witnessed friends, influencers, and brands get censored for sharing innocuous photos of knives, butchering meat for the table, and more.

The Westrn is not just a hook-and-bullet publication, either. Our work will touch on all elements of the outdoors. When hunting content gets blocked, all that “safe” subject matter disappears with it. We can’t work on or with a platform that lets that happen.  

It’s fitting that we’re already getting smacked down for breaking the rules. After all, The Westrn is our collective attempt to answer a pressing question:

What happens when we refuse to abide by the laws of internet publishing? 

Like many writers who have jumped to Substack, we hope that good work can transcend the need for social media. In true “trad pub” fashion, our goal is to write like it’s the olden days. We want to create the most hand-hewn, homegrown, horse-driven outdoor media you’ve seen since reading that yellowed, 1990 issue of Outside Magazine in some backcountry pit toilet. 

We don’t want to make something that grows at all costs. We want to make something that lasts at all costs. But we can’t survive in a place that doesn’t let us live our rawest truths as outdoorspeople trying to exist closer to the beating heart of worldly life that, ultimately, does end with death. There’s no two ways around that part. Nothing on this planet makes it out alive anyway. It’s the only thing we all have in common.

You Can Support The Westrn

We’re creating good outdoor media for the mortals in the boiler room. If you want to help a group of rowdy, brutally honest humans who love breaking the rules, laughing at ourselves, and making the stiffs in the C-suite a little nervous, you have a few options.

• Subscribe for free on Substack. Times are tough and money’s tight. We get it. Our stories are currently free for the first two weeks, then will move into a paid archive. We want the public to have access as we build our foundation.

• Buy in as a paid subscriber.  You can make The Westrn durable for the cost of one beer a month. Five bucks is not a huge ask, and we intend to keep it that way.

• Send our subscription link to your friends in an email or a text. Or, better yet, pick up the phone and call them. They miss your voice.

• Call or email us. Reach out with whatever tips, news, or fun stories you want to share.

• A lot of folks have already asked to work with us. Hang tight. We want to pay freelancers fairly. To expedite this process, consider purchasing a paid subscription to help us build an operating budget. 

Thanks for being here for us. We promise to be here for you with stories that matter. We believe — if we build The Westrn with integrity — our stories will withstand the many tests of our time.

Signing off —

The Westrn Editorial Team