Substack Has Its First Plagiarism Scandal

Earlier this week, writer Katie Jgln took to her Substack page, The Noösphere, to share her experience of being plagiarised. Around a year ago, she says, she ‘opened the TikTok app and was served a video of Maalvika discussing an essay she’d just published. ‘It’s my most well-researched Substack,’ she announced proudly, before diving into the ideas and evidence she’d supposedly compiled. Only they weren’t her ideas. And they weren’t her words. And it wasn’t her research — it was mine.’

Screenshots prove that her essay on algorithms rewarding misogynistic content, which she published on February 9th, had been lifted wholesale by a user named Maalvika, who currently has over 32,000 subscribers and is one of the platform’s biggest bestsellers. Her work is a mixture of pseudo-philosophy and inspirational rhetoric, usually with a focus on online culture. It’s the kind of content that does well on Substack, whose app eagerly pushes stuff like this to the top of your feed regardless of what you’re reading or writing about. If only a tenth of her followers are paying £41 a year to access her paid posts, she’s pulling in a massive payday for plagiarised work.

Eventually, Maalvika offered a weak non-apology in which she insisted that she hadn’t intended to plagiarise Jgln. Rather, she had ‘inadvertently left her exact words in the final draft without credit.’ She also tried to deflect away from her own theft by questioning Jgln’s timing with her post calling her out, and that ‘every piece I’ve written is fully and authentically in my own voice. Any assertion to the contrary is false.’ Given that plagiarists seldom steal once then become 100% original, that’s a claim that is going to be rigorously fact-checked by many fellow Substack users. Jgln’s post claims that she found ‘entire paragraphs lifted from other writers, including Noah Smith.’

Substack is a platform with major problems, to put it mildly. Under the guise of supporting free speech, the site has refused to deplatform racists and Nazis. Substack CEO Hamish McKenzie said the company would continue to allow the publication of extremist views because attempting to censor them would make the problem worse, a claim nobody believes. The supposed altruism of this stance rings hollow when you know that, according to reporting by the Center for Countering Digital Hate from 2022, the company earned $2.5 million per year from the top five anti-vaccine writers on Substack. Earlier this month, it was reported that Substack had raised $100 million of extra funding but was also looking at adding ads to the site (full disclaimer: I use Substack.)

As the site’s usage increases, it is perhaps inevitable that plagiarism would become a problem. Substack technically does have some advice on tackling plagiarism on its site, but it is rather toothless. Their first piece of advice is just to publicly shame the thief and hope it resolves the problem, but if that doesn’t, then they suggest legal action and DMCA notices. There’s no help from Substack itself to enforce these copyright strikes or moderate users who have been caught stealing. It can be a massive uphill climb trying to take on plagiarists online, but one would imagine that a platform greatly profiting from its users would want to offer the most beneficial experience possible for creators and patrons alike. Then again, they won’t even get rid of the Nazis.

In December 2023, the YouTuber Harry Brewis, known as Hbomberguy, made a now-legendary four-hour video on plagiarism on the platform that decimated the careers of a couple of prolific content thieves. As Brewis noted in his video essay, plagiarism is terrifyingly prevalent on YouTube, easy to miss, and almost impossible to police. The issue has only gotten worse with generative AI polluting the internet with slop that is a shadow of someone else’s real work. No platform is immune to this problem, whether it’s joke theft on Twitter, TikTokers stealing ideas and dances, or podcasters lifting research wholesale for entire episodes. Substack is trying to sell itself as a platform where original ideas flourish, but algorithmically, it’s just like everywhere else: the derivative stuff rises to the top, and other people’s repackaged or outright ripped-off labour is copy-pasted without a second thought.

‘Something has to be really, really broken for someone who blatantly plagiarises to become a bestseller,’ wrote Jgln. ‘Or perhaps nothing’s broken at all, and things are working exactly as they’re meant to. Perhaps this is just another stage in the ensh**tification process Cory Doctorow warned us about.’ I heartily empathise. Anyone who is trying to make a living out of writing in 2025 has to contend with the nightmare cycle of dwindling opportunities, decreasing editorial freedom, and the pollution of AI slop. How many more plagiarists are there on Substack who we just haven’t caught yet? There’s nobody looking out for those writers except themselves because the site itself sure doesn’t care. As long as they get money from somewhere, why would the source matter?

Major platforms don’t want to confront plagiarism because they’re not so secretly hoping for a future where AI-generated content spat out of the maws of the giant theft computer becomes the journalistic norm. They want the internet to become so oversaturated with creepy shrimp Jesuses, robot voices, and paragraphs of words that say nothing because they want us to become used to it. They want us to stop noticing it or seeing it as a bad thing. Worse, they want us to pay for the privilege. The tech world’s ideal #content is anti-human, anti-union, anti-radical, and completely interchangeable with everything else around it; a simulacrum of inspiration that is primed to be copy-pasted onto Shein t-shirts and Temu wall prints. Of course, none of that can work without humans creating the stuff that needs to be stolen and fed into the machine. Substack’s hands-off approach in the name of free speech and imagination is a cheap ruse that allows the worst actions and ideas to fester.