Artist Joe Rogan has vowed to do more to offer more rigorous views on his podcast, after Neil Young and Joni Mitchell criticized him for helping spread misinformation about Covid .
As a result, Canadian musicians asked Spotify to remove their music from the famous streaming platform. Spotify has since said it is working to add advisory tools to any podcast that talks about Covid-19.
Spotify joins the crusade against ‘fake news’
Rogan publicly apologized to the company and promised to do better. In a nearly 10-minute-long Instagram video posted a few weeks ago, Rogan said he would “go out of his way to interview people with different points of view” on his show, which averages 11 million listeners per episode. A real barbarity.
Much of the controversy concerns two recent episodes of Rogan’s podcast, which featured cardiologist Peter McCullough and immunologist and virologist Robert Malone. Both expressed views that were contrary to general information provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Rogan denied trying to spread false information, saying he had “never tried to do anything with this podcast other than just talk to people.” But he also admitted that “I was absolutely wrong” and backed Spotify’s plan to put a disclaimer at the beginning of controversial episodes.
“My commitment to listeners is that I will do my best to try to balance these more controversial viewpoints with other people’s perspectives, so that we can improve the quality of the debate and what is being talked about here,” he said, adding that he “had no hard feelings” toward Young or Mitchell. “I’m not mad at Neil Young, I’m a huge fan of Neil Young,” he said, also noting his admiration for Mitchell’s music.
Pressure has mounted on social media to address harmful falsehoods and conspiracies about vaccines and covid-19 during the pandemic. Now the spotlight is on Spotify. Its new policy of labeling content about Covid-19 and the option to remove or suspend users and podcasts that promote misleading claims is very similar to those adopted by Facebook, YouTube and Twitter many months ago.
Spotify is late for content review
Why is Spotify late in moderating its content ? In part, it’s about the medium. Monitoring and tagging audio is not as easy as tagging images or text posts. And Spotify is not a traditional social network: not only do they host Rogan’s podcast, but they pay him €100 million for the right to do so.
The social media giants say that they allow connections between users and that they are not publishers. Spotify’s relationship with Rogan is something completely different, since there is a lot of money involved.
