Joe Rogan is a contrarian comedian who interviews people he considers interesting, often letting them ramble; he doesn’t offer himself as an authority or broadcast on a channel with “news” in the name like Tucker Carlson does. His estimated 11 million listeners per podcast on Spotify — more than double Carlson’s average viewership on Fox — expect entertainment and engaging conversation.
But they are listening intently as they stream or download the show. More important, Spotify hosts Rogan not as just another podcaster out of hundreds of thousands, but as a jewel in their crown, for whom they paid a reported $100 million for exclusive rights. And that’s why the multibillion-dollar internet media company couldn’t just tune out hundreds of public health experts who warned he was complicit in spreading dangerous disinformation about COVID-19, a message old geezer folkies Neil Young and Joni Mitchell amplified last week with a “him or us” ultimatum. Rogan has irresponsibly praised ivermectin — a drug that has no proven anti-viral benefits — to fight COVID-19, and has suggested young and healthy people needn’t bother getting vaccinated.
Though Spotify is known primarily as a music platform, like Facebook and Twitter and TikTok and every other network, it transmits oodles of information — and somehow had yet to articulate a policy on what to do about the propagation of lies, even harmful ones. Nuts.
.jpg?w=600)
