Spotify says it bans “dangerous false or dangerous deceptive medical information,” for example, yet its definition of what constitutes “dangerous” (drinking bleach, claiming vaccines are “designed to cause death”) is so extreme that there’s plenty of wiggle room for less egregious but equally false information. What’s more, Spotify’s rules are so broad they likely wouldn’t make a difference in most of Rogan’s episodes anyway. Scrambling to undo the damage, Rogan took to Instagram to say, “If I pissed you off, I’m sorry,” and to promise he would try to “balance things out” with “more experts with differing opinions.” Spotify’s CEO Ek, meanwhile, put out his blog post, but conspicuously didn’t mention Rogan, suggesting there won’t be any repercussions for the podcaster. Robert Malone, who had already been banned from Twitter for spreading COVID-19 misinformation, declared that people who trust vaccines are victims of “mass formation psychosis.” Soon rockstar Neil Young pulled his music from Spotify, quickly followed by singer Joni Mitchell, while author Brene Brown paused her popular podcast. The current controversy was kicked off a few weeks ago when more than 250 scientists and healthcare professionals wrote an open letter about Rogan’s podcast “promoting baseless conspiracy theories.” They were especially alarmed by a December podcast in which Dr. That’s not “censorship.” It’s fact checking. They’re simply asking it to publish standards and uphold them. It’s a straw man argument: nobody’s asking Spotify to be a censor, not even its harshest critics. What it doesn’t get to do is set rules and then pretend it isn’t responsible for enforcing them.Įk’s suggestion that moderating content would make Spotify a “censor” is especially egregious. Spotify, as a private company, gets to make its own rules, to make choices about what it allows and doesn’t on its own air.
But the Constitution doesn’t give them the right to spout misinformation on any platform they choose. Joe Rogan and his guests have the right to believe and say anything they’d like, without fear of government reprisal. I’m as fierce a defender as you will find of freedom of speech. When you pay to acquire content, “you’re it.” You don’t get to have it both ways: you can’t both own it- and profit from it as Spotify does-yet not take responsibility for it. From my vantage point, the answer seems pretty clear.
The answer has implications not just for Spotify but for other digital platforms that have begun paying some content creators, including Facebook, Snapchat and TikTok. The Rogan episode has thrown into high relief the question of whether it’s a “platform” that simply allows creators to spread content, or whether it is a media company, which has legal liability. When sources pushed falsehoods, our responsibility was to challenge them and to report the facts-not to hand them the microphone and turn up the volume.
My role was always to ensure that the news we published was accurate and fair. We would be liable if we intentionally published false information. Anybody in my field would be out of a job if we knowingly published nonsense and then disavowed any responsibility for it. I’ve spent my career in publishing, including as editor in chief of USA Today.
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