To be sure, anyone can host a podcast on Spotify. It’s just like uploading a video on YouTube – just that, instead of actually hosting your audio content the way you upload your video content to YouTube, you’d essentially be only giving an RSS feed link to Spotify.
The process is explained in excruciating detail here. It takes a few hours for the Spotify team to add you as a podcast host on Spotify, unlike the instant upload offered by say, YouTube.
So, given that the process is largely like uploading content on social media platforms, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s initial response (shared on the company blog) to the Joe Rogan controversy sounded very much like how a Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey talks when confronted on uncomfortable issues around content moderation.
Ek said, “Personally, there are plenty of individuals and views on Spotify that I disagree with strongly. We know we have a critical role to play in supporting creator expression while balancing it with the safety of our users. In that role, it is important to me that we don’t take on the position of being content censor while also making sure that there are rules in place and consequences for those who violate them.”
Zuckerberg has used similar words very often, and so have many other Facebook spokespersons.
Consider Zuckerberg’s speech at Georgetown University in 2019: “I’m here today because I believe we must continue to stand for free expression. I believe we have two responsibilities: to remove content when it could cause real danger as effectively as we can, and to fight to uphold as wide a definition of freedom of expression as possible — and not allow the definition of what is considered dangerous to expand beyond what is absolutely necessary.”
But Ek did not mention the person at the center of the controversy at all – Joe Rogan. He skirted around the topic and like a really well-trained CXO spokesperson, avoided talking about why he was forced to address the world and bridged it towards a Facebook-style note on ‘expression’.
Unfortunately, the controversy Spotify finds itself in is not at all like what a Facebook or a Twitter or a YouTube face so very frequently.
The person who caused the problem for Spotify is not a random online character who had a simple podcast hosted freely on Spotify.
Spotify wooed Joe Rogan, paid him US $100 million to gain the privilege of hosting on their platform.
That’s not like you and me opening a Facebook account and saying what we want in the name of free expression. That’s like a mainstream book publisher paying top dollar to a writer and inviting him/her to write a book that can be published by them. That’s like a top TV network inviting a star anchor to host a show on their channel.
The book publisher or a TV network has internal processes, checks, and balances on content and content creators. Does Spotify have them?
A subsequent (forced by the blowback and market conditions, no doubt) internal memo from Ek to Spotify employees addresses that part:
“Another criticism that I continue to hear from many of you is that it’s not just about The Joe Rogan Experience on Spotify; it comes down to our direct relationship with him. In last week’s Town Hall, I outlined to you that we are not the publisher of JRE. But perception due to our exclusive license implies otherwise.”
So, that implies that despite paying good money to Joe Rogan to bring his hugely popular podcast on Spotify, the streaming giant continued to treat him like any other singer on the platform who is the responsibility of the record labels… or ‘others’. Just not ‘us’ (Spotify). In other words, Spotify had not thought through the kind of power a super-influencer could wield using its platform as the channel and the kind of impact that power could have on misinformation.
That Joe Rogan says things that are tasteless, tacky, and vile are very different topics. There’s a rich history on that front, but this is not about that at all.
But misinformation, that too around vaccines when the world is in a tizzy during a raging pandemic that is causing deaths, is entirely something else.
What kind of misinformation? Rogan “has suggested that healthy young people should not get vaccinated, claimed vaccines are unnecessary if you take ivermectin, said mRNA-based vaccines are “gene therapy,” and speculated that the vaccine contains microchips“! (Source) This, from a person who, in his apology claimed, “I’m not a doctor. I’m not a scientist”. So why is a person who is not a doctor or a scientist by profession offering his personal conclusions on vaccines being unnecessary or about ivermectin?
And why does Rogan sound so effective while spouting misinformation? One theory is about the tone and the manner in which he calmly delivers them.
That was the last straw that opened the floodgates for complaints, including star musicians like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell who were willing to go as far as pull their music off the platform (put their money where their protest is)!
Shutting Joe Rogan is not the answer to this either. But Ek cleverly made it about censorship early on, taking a line from the Facebook book of replies. Spotify is a publisher, unlike Facebook that keeps viewing itself merely as an enabler.
Ek’s earlier PR advice was to treat Spotify’s podcasts like Facebook, a user-generated content hosting platform, and invoke ‘free speech’ templates to tide over the crisis.
With a mainstream music artist, Spotify is merely a music streaming platform, but with Joe Rogan, Spotify is very much a full-fledged publisher. What does a publisher do to creators? They equip the creators with teams of appropriate professionals to bring the original piece of work in a way that it does not fall into the most obvious traps – errors, misinformation, copyright issues, potential legal issues, and so on. This is table-stakes for any publisher.
But this costs money, time, and effort. Spotify had clearly not bargained for all that time, money, or effort. It assumed that having guidelines that creators could read on their own and do the right thing should work. It did not, as Spotify had to painfully realize after this incident.
That misinformation is the biggest bane of our times is not in doubt to anybody. And social media platforms that enable user-generated content are bearing the brunt of user-generated misinformation every single day, with multiple Governments burning the midnight oil in trying to reign in the massive misinformation storm that is affecting all of us, particularly during the time of a global crisis like a full-blown, devastating pandemic.
But publishers fooling themselves—and the public—to be user-generated platforms despite luring creators with a US $100 million fee and having a loosely guided oversight mechanism for such stars is a new low. This is evading platform accountability, far unlike what a Facebook or Twitter is struggling with because of the sheer number of user-generated content (and in multiple languages) they have to deal with.
It took a few vocal music artists to force Spotify’s hand to really take its role as a publisher seriously. But we cannot expect the right people to step and speak up for every such infraction where publishers use the free expression argument to shirk their responsibility.
The ask from Spotify, the publisher, was not censorship, even though Ek made it about that in a botched PR move. The ask from Spotify was editorial oversight, as any self-respecting publisher would.