Spotify’s concessions over Rogan fail to placate censors

The fuss over podcaster Joe Rogan having conversations some people don’t like continues, with Spotify introducing Facebook-style advisory labels.

In a blog post, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek sought to update the company’s rules around Covid, a move clearly prompted by the Rogan fuss. “…we have an obligation to do more to provide balance and access to widely-accepted information from the medical and scientific communities…” he conceded. The main way Spotify plans to do this is to add a content advisory to any pod that talks about Covid, which will link to an information hub on the matter.

This should be sufficient for all the people claiming to be concerned about ‘misinformation’, since all the easily swayed innocents they’re claiming to act on behalf of are being given an easy path towards further information on the matter. For many, however, their real agenda has been exposed by their rejection of this concession or any other short of either outright censorship of Rogan or his expulsion from Spotify.

Rogan, too, felt compelled to directly address the controversy in a video published on Instagram. “They have an opinion that’s different from the mainstream narrative,” he said, in reference to the recent guests that so upset some antiquated musicians. In response to the accusation of spreading misinformation, he said: “Many of the things we thought of as misinformation just a short while ago are now accepted as fact.”

This is a key point. Who decides what is and isn’t misinformation? Who is qualified or even has a popular mandate to be the ultimate arbiter of truth? Rogan conceded the content advisory labels are a good idea and pledged to try to immediately balance his most controversial guests with those that represent a contrary view. “I don’t know what else I can do differently,” said Rogan, before concluding: “It’s good to have some haters – it makes you reassess what you’re doing and put things into perspective.”

A podcast (such as our own, the most recent of which features a discussion of this very matter) is just a monologue or conversation published onto the internet. There are millions of them, many of which will feature inaccuracies, fringe opinions and offensive material. Yet somehow they have escaped the attention of Neil Young and the other censors, presumably because they are less influential.

The term ‘misinformation’ has become code for anything not rubber stamped by the establishment. This is about control of public information, with many apparently wishing it could be entirely restricted to establishment sources. In other words, it’s impossible for the likes of the BBC or the New York Times to disseminate misinformation. But the internet genie is already out of the bottle and the establishment has had a bad pandemic when it comes to accuracy, so people are voting with their feet.

Rogan is guilty of nothing more than having conversations a lot of people want to listen to. The problem for the establishment is that he’s more popular than it and is entirely beyond its control. The frequent attacks on Spotify are symptomatic of the resulting frustrated impotence and serve only to increase Rogan’s audience. The establishment can’t win this battle but will doubtless continue to rage against the dying of the light. Spotify’s share price was up 3% in pre-market trading at time of writing.