This month, Rolling Stone Reports stated that 270 doctors, nurses, educators, scientists and other health professionals were urging Spotify to adopt a misinformation policy. This initiative was inspired by a December 31 episode of The Joe Rogan ExperienceJoe Rogan hosted the popular podcast ‘The Joe Rogan Podcast’, which featured Dr. Robert Malone. Malone is a virologist who has been Twitter account for misinformation regarding Covid-19. During the episode, Malone promoted various Covid-19-related conspiracy theories, such as the debunked idea that the medical establishment’s espousal of vaccines was due to “mass formation psychosis.”
This group was not advocating for Rogan, who reportedly has a $100 million contract with Spotify, to be removed from the platform, or even that the episode featuring Malone should be removed — rather, it was asking Spotify to clarify its guidelines regarding medical misinformation, if it had any to begin with. (Spotify released later its internal guidelines. “longstanding platform rules.”) “Spotify has a responsibility to mitigate the spread of misinformation on its platform, though the company presently has no misinformation policy,”Let the letter be read.
The letter now has over 1,300 signatures and went viral. #DeleteSpotify became a trend, and Neil Young was the first to report it. Rolling Stone), Joni Mitchell, Nils Lofgren will pull their music from this platform. “When these heroic women and men, who’ve spent their lives healing and saving ours, cry out for help you don’t turn your back on them for money and power. You listen and stand with them,”Lofgren stated this in a Saturday statement, referring to the health care professionals who wrote the letter. Brene Brown, podcaster and authorEven Harry and Meghan are royals. They expressed concern about Spotify’s lack of misinformation policy.
Backlash was also generated by conservatives, especially right-wing media outlets. They accused the signatories to trying to censor Rogan. Katrine Wallace, an epidemiologist, co-authored and signed the letter. This was to include nurses and other health care providers like physical therapists. “These are the people seeing all the devastation Covid has caused,”She says. Some of the letter’s signers also received death threats. However, overall the nation’s reaction was far greater than anyone expected. “The intention was to get Spotify to put a policy in place, but when they refused to do so, it became a national conversation,” Wallace tells Rolling Stone. “We were happy to see there was a lot of support. But more significantly, I am very proud of the fact that we started a national conversation about misinformation.”
Last weekend, in a lengthy blog Post, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek finally addressed the ongoing controversy by publishing Spotify’s internal medical misinformation policy, which prohibits “content that promotes dangerous false or dangerous deceptive medical information that may cause offline harm or poses a direct threat to public health.”Also, Spotify will now offer content advisories to all content that is related to Covid-19. The announcement was made in the same manner as Instagram and Twitter. “From the very first days of the pandemic, Spotify has been biased toward action,” Ek wrote in his post, detailing the company’s Covid-19 relief efforts to “[give] you a sense of how seriously we’ve approached the pandemic as a company.”
However, these efforts have not convinced the architects of the original letter. Covid-19 content being labeled “whether it’s Joe Rogan or the CDC… further creates a ‘false balance’ problem,” says Wallace. “It’s designed to look like they’re doing something, but they’re not doing anything. It’s more spectacle than substance.”
Abbie Richards is a misinformation researcher and helped to organize the effort to write the letter. She agrees that it is important to label all COVID-19 content posted on the platform. “the definition of too little, too late,”Warning labels on content could lead to greater skepticism regarding both “fake”Legitimate news.
Darren Linvill is a Clemson University student who studies social media disinformation. He also doubts that Spotify will warn users about misinformation. While he refers to Spotify’s actions as “a step in the right direction,”He notes the effectiveness of content warnings “is still relatively unknown. It’s a very difficult thing to study, in part because of the difficulty in obtaining the right data from the platforms.”Some ResearchHe claims that even content warnings have indicated that “they may have the opposite of the desired effect, increasing the likelihood of some media users to engage with the content.”
Richards praises Spotify because it is more transparent about internal policies guidelines. But, she also says that the guidelines themselves are a bit confusing. “They could be broader to encompass more general medical misinformation, and also more specific about what is the line they draw. It’s quite unclear: what are you allowed to do and not allowed to do? Rogan has somehow avoided crossing the line,”She said. Although she doesn’t wish for Rogan to be removed from Spotify, she is shocked that Spotify hasn’t taken down any of his episodes containing Covid-19 information, such as the Malone one, which appears to be in violation of Spotify guidelines prohibiting it. “dangerous false or dangerous deceptive medical information that may cause offline harm.”
“There’s quite a hefty amount of misinformation in several episodes. Maybe that shouldn’t be allowed, and [removing them] could be a way to solve the problem,”She said. “If he wants to have a relationship with Spotify, they should put the brakes on at a certain point.”
For his part, Rogan addressed the controversy on Monday morning, posting a nine-minute video responding to Young’s decision to pull his music and the platform’s move to adopt content warnings, which he said he agreed with. He apologized for those who had criticized his podcast. He also promised to do more research on contentious topics and to feature more. “mainstream”To balance out fringe views, guests “I want to show all kinds of opinions so that we can all figure out what’s going on and not just about Covid, about everything about health, about fitness, wellness, the state of the world,”Rogan made these remarks in his statement. Rogan pointed out in the same statement that “any of the things that we thought of as misinformation just a short while ago are now accepted as fact,”As an example, we can cite the widely accepted inefficacy cloth masks have.
Wallace is skeptical that Rogan is earnest in his desire to curb misinformation on his platform, nor is she persuaded by Spotify’s recent efforts to do damage control, given the company’s enormous reported financial interest in Rogan. “It’s not about cancel culture. Nobody is trying to stop Rogan from making podcasts,”She said. “And it’s not just that Spotify permits misinformation. It’s that they’re sponsoring it. They’re paying him to produce misinformation, and they’re standing by it.”