SAN FRANCISCO — Addressing 4,000 employees and a livestream audience the company described as "everyone who was allowed in," Podium founder and CEO Colton Reache on Wednesday explained that the platform's removal of 11 million posts last quarter was not censorship but "the single largest act of free expression in human history, and all of it was mine."
"People keep confusing two very different things," said Reache, 38, pacing in front of a slide that read MY SPEECH ≥ YOUR SPEECH. "When the government takes down your post, that's censorship. When a rival platform takes down your post, that's censorship. When I take down your post, that is me speaking. And as you can see, I have a lot to say."
Reache's position has unusually firm legal footing. In Moody v. NetChoice, decided in July 2024, the Supreme Court said that a platform's choices about what to keep, remove and rank in its feeds are editorial judgments protected by the First Amendment. Reache keeps a laminated copy of the opinion in his breast pocket and produces it, employees say, "every time someone says the word 'ban' within 30 feet of him." "The highest court in the land has confirmed that deleting you is my art," he said. "You wouldn't tell Picasso which paint to scrape off."
Reache founded Podium in 2022 under the slogan "Say Anything," which was revised in 2024 to "Say Anything*" and this spring to "Say." The asterisk now links to a 212-page document called the Liberty Guidelines, which the company describes as "minimal." Under the guidelines, users may not impersonate, mock or "pre-emptively mock" the CEO; post his jet's flight times, which Reache called "doxxing, and also a joke I didn't think of first"; or type the word "censorship," which the platform now automatically replaces with "curation."
"We don't ban words," said Marissa Delgado-Finch, Podium's chief trust officer. "We send them somewhere quiet to think about what they said."
The company's approach to misinformation has also evolved. Like several large platforms, Podium dropped professional fact-checkers in favor of crowdsourced notes. Meta made the same switch in the United States in 2025, and researchers who studied X's version have found that most notes users write are never shown to anyone. Podium says its system is more efficient. Of 2.3 million notes submitted this year, one was displayed, on a Reache post stating that the platform had "zero moderation." It was removed four minutes later by what the company called "the community." Asked who the community was, Reache said, "It's a community of one, and it is extremely engaged."
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Reache drew a distinction between "freedom of speech" and "freedom of reach," a phrase popular across the industry, then introduced a third category, "freedom of breach," which covers his right to read users' direct messages "to make sure they're still free." Posts that criticize the company are never removed, he stressed. They are "right-sized" to an audience of one: the person who wrote them. "Nobody is being silenced," he said. "You can say whatever you want, as loudly as you want, to yourself. That's the purest form of speech there is. It's called thinking, and we're piloting a subscription for it."
That subscription would join Podium's existing tiers: the $8-a-month Free Speech plan, the $40 Freer Speech plan, which permits criticism of the CEO on weekends, and Absolute Free Speech, an enterprise plan priced at $2.4 million a year and currently held by two national governments and a cryptocurrency exchange. "Speech has never been more free," Reache said. "It just has never been less cheap."
Reache also hailed the federal government's settlement in March of Missouri v. Biden, a consent decree that bars federal agencies from threatening platforms with penalties over users' posts for 10 years. "This is a historic victory," he said. "For the next decade, no bureaucrat can pressure me to remove your post." He then removed a post from a woman in the third row who had just written, "but you're literally—". "That decision belongs to me alone," he continued, "as the Founders intended, and as nine justices declined to stop."
The town hall's question-and-answer session was moderated in advance. Of 6,400 questions submitted by employees, three were selected: "Why are you so brave?", "How do you stay so humble?" and "Could you explain free speech again, but slower?" A fourth, "Isn't this just censorship with a nicer font?", was answered by the removal of the question, the account that asked it and, briefly, the employee's badge access.
"He's correct that it's legal," said Dr. Lionel Achebe-Strauss, who studies platform governance at the Institute for Things Said Out Loud. "The First Amendment protects his right to run his site like a dinner party. He just keeps insisting it's the town square, and that the guest list is everyone except whoever is talking."
The final demonstration was the Liberty Filter, a feature that rewrites users' posts "to be more free" before they are published. "We aren't changing what you said," Delgado-Finch told the audience. "We're changing it into what you would have said if you were right." In early testing, the filter raised positive sentiment toward Podium leadership by 940%, a figure Reache called "organic."
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The Liberty Filter does not change your meaning. It changes your words until they mean something better. Highlighted words have been liberated. Reach figures are estimates and are also final.
Shareholders appeared satisfied. Podium's stock rose 6% during the event, and a company spokesperson said user trust had "never been higher among the users who are left."
At press time, Reache had announced an independent Free Speech Oversight Council of five members chosen for their range of opinion: himself, his college roommate, two accounts he runs under other names and the laminated opinion. The council's first ruling, issued unanimously, found that this article had been curated.
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