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.
Fortunately, that changed Sunday, with the company’s publication of new rules about how it’ll handle sensitive, illegal and deceptive content. They’re familiar-feeling but welcome guidelines warning people against dehumanizing others on the basis of race, gender and other characteristics, or inciting violence, or trying to rip people off, or “promoting or suggesting that vaccines approved by local health authorities are designed to cause death.” For good measure, Rogan (kinda) apologized and promised to do better.
Yet one can still find the podcast of viciously anti-vax Robert F. Kennedy Jr., recent episodes of which are titled “Clinical Trial Nightmare” and “War Against Doctors with Conscience.” Is Spotify’s new policy for Rogan or for all?
