I’m very happy with that,” he said.īritain’s Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, who have signed a multi-year deal to produce and host podcasts for Spotify under their production company Archewell Audio, on Sunday urged Spotify to tame virus misinformation.Rogan welcomed the idea of adding advisories before podcasts related to COVID-19. “Last April, our co-founders began expressing concerns to our partners at Spotify about the all too real consequences of COVID-19 misinformation on its platform,” an Archewell spokesperson said in a statement. “We have continued to express our concerns to Spotify to ensure changes to its platform are made to help address this public health crisis. We look to Spotify to meet this moment and are committed to continuing our work together as it does.”Įarlier Sunday, Nils Lofgren, the Bruce Springsteen guitarist and a member of Crazy Horse, a frequent collaborator with Young, said he was joining Young’s Spotify revolt. Lofgren said he had already had the last 27 years of his music removed and requested labels with his earlier music to do likewise. “We encourage all musicians, artists and music lovers everywhere to stand with us and cut ties with Spotify,” wrote Lofgren in a statement. On Friday, Joni Mitchell said she is seeking to remove all of her music from Spotify in solidarity with Young. Earlier, hundreds of scientists, professors and public health experts called on Spotify “to immediately establish a clear and public policy to moderate misinformation on its platform.” Their criticism focused on a Dec. 31 episode from “The Joe Rogan Experience” in which Rogan featured Dr. Robert Malone, an infectious-disease specialist who has been banned from Twitter for spreading COVID-19.When Spotify signed The Joe Rogan Experience to a hundred million dollar exclusive distribution deal this summer, practically everyone wondered how the audio streaming platform would handle the next time Rogan brought on Alex Jones, the notorious conspiracy theorist whose provably false and harmful provocations got his ass de-platformed by several major tech companies - including Spotify itself - in 2018. Rogan had proven willing to give Jones a platform a few times before, engaging the conspiracy theorist in a distinctly Roganian “you’ve said some crazy stuff before but you’ve also said some controversial stuff I think you were right about so it all evens out for me” style of discourse that typically allows Jones to get off a high volume of conspiracy claims with Rogan only contesting some of those claims to the extent he’s interested enough to do so. It took just under two months since The Joe Rogan Experience officially debuted on Spotify for the show to vault the company into that exact controversy everyone knew was coming. Last Tuesday, the podcast dropped a three hour-long episode with Jones, in which the conspiracy theorist, accompanied by the comedian Tim Dillon, did all the things you’d expect from the face of Infowars. Jones, who previously claimed that Sandy Hook was a hoax, also said that “a lot of studies show” that masks won’t protect people in large groups from getting COVID. (The CDC recommends people wear a mask “anywhere they will be around other people.”)Īt another point, Jones exaggerates an incident in which an oral vaccine caused polio in recipients. Jones says the vaccine caused 100 percent of recipients to get sick after taking it, before Rogan pulls up an AP article that details the cases of two children who were paralyzed after receiving the vaccine. Dillon and Jones also claim that the Democrats are intentionally trying to keep the US economy down in order to get Trump out of office. The episode drew a ton of criticism and negative coverage, as you would expect, but as The Verge points out, Rogan did again engage in some form of fact-checking, which does somewhat complicate the narrative around this specific situation, since Rogan advocates could argue (justifiably, I guess) that this isn’t simply a case where Jones was given free rein to spread misinformation. Indeed, the logic system does get a little tricky for those who wish to structurally push back against Rogan here: Spotify denying Rogan the ability to give Jones an appearance means that news organizations would not theoretically be free to engage Jones in a “properly” fact-checked podcast appearance should they wish to do so and still get distributed on the platform. Meanwhile, leaning on a framework where only news organizations get to do such things on the platform means that someone has to designate who gets to be a news organization on Spotify, which can be a dicey proposition.
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