Following weeks of criticism over Spotify’s controversial podcast host Joe Rogan and the company’s opaque approach to moderating potentially harmful inaccurate content about COVID-19 on its platform, the CEO of the popular streaming service Daniel Ek acknowledged Sunday that “we haven’t been transparent around the policies that guide our content more broadly.”
“Based on the feedback over the last several weeks, it’s become clear to me that we have an obligation to do more to provide balance and access to widely accepted information from the medical and scientific communities guiding us through this unprecedented time,” Ek said in a blog post, which announced the publication of the platform’s internal content moderation policies as well as a new labeling system for COVID-19-related content.
However, Ek did not specifically mention Rogan or his show “The Joe Rogan Experience” — the most popular podcast on Spotify — and Ek’s post hinted that the company was not going to bow to calls from artists such as Neil Young to remove Rogan’s show from the platform entirely over the host’s oft-criticized discussions of COVID-19 scientific issues.
