This whole thing is reminiscent of the uproar at Netflix over Dave Chappelle's special last year in that case Netflix offered similar reassurances, nothing changed, and things quieted down. Spotify is clearly hoping people just move on. is it that different for Spotify to just write Rogan a check? That's hard to know. But Facebook and YouTube do give those creators monetization and growth tools, and recommend their content to users.Even the rules aren't really rules so much as gentle nudgings. Even the section titled "What happens to rule breakers?" just says content might be taken down and accounts might be suspended. As far as I can tell, Rogan didn't violate any of them. Spotify's newly published Platform Rules fall short of prescribing much of anything.And they're definitely not writing $100 million checks. But Facebook and YouTube aren't directly funding their most problematic contributors. It wants to be seen like Facebook or YouTube: a more or less neutral platform on which people might sometimes post horrible things.But there's less question as to whether Spotify has a responsibility for the shows it pays to produce and promotes aggressively to its hundreds of millions of users. Whether Spotify has a responsibility to moderate every podcast on its platform is a genuinely interesting question, and one the company should think deeply about especially as it continues to invest in technology that helps it understand what's happening on those shows. Still, Ek's response rang hollow to many critics. Was Spotify ever really going to take Neil Young's side instead of the most popular podcast on its platform? And it's even harder when the offending party is your flagship product, the show you spent a fortune to bring onto your platform. Moderating audio - on demand on Spotify or live on Greenroom - is hard, especially at scale. That's also what Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and others did in response to misinformation and disinformation about the pandemic. Spotify did make a few changes in response to the uproar: It published its content guidelines for the first time, and said it's working on adding a "content advisory" to every podcast that includes discussion of COVID that will direct people to accurate information about the subject.And he said that "it is important to me that we don't take on the position of being content censor," which is a line straight out of the Mark Zuckerberg canon. He intimated that Spotify doesn't agree with what Rogan said, without ever explicitly saying so. Ek's post sounded eerily familiar to anyone who has followed the content moderation issues with Facebook and other platforms. Rogan is never mentioned, but Daniel Ek's post did acknowledge that "you've had a lot of questions over the last few days about our platform policies and the lines we have drawn between what is acceptable and what is not." Spotify published a blog post yesterday that kinda, sorta addressed the issue. Brene Brown also said she's stopping production on her popular podcast, though she hasn't explicitly tied the decision to the Rogan fiasco. Neil Young became the first big-name artist to pull his music from Spotify "because Spotify is spreading fake information about the vaccines." Joni Mitchell and a couple of other artists have followed suit. In many cases, that's enough, and things go away. This has become classic platform behavior: The first step when folks are upset about your content is to say nothing, do nothing, maybe eventually issue a statement that sort of decries the bad content but mostly says nothing. An episode from December was particularly controversial, causing a number of scientific and medical groups to accuse Rogan of "provoking distrust in science and medicine" and to urge Spotify to "mitigate the spread of misinformation on its platform." Since then, Rogan has continued to do what he always did, which is relatively frequently veer into deeply problematic content and misinformation, particularly when it comes to COVID-19. Here's a quick catch-up on the Rogan controversy: Spotify paid $100 million to make Rogan's podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, a Spotify exclusive. And yesterday, after days of trying to ignore the issue, Spotify finally had to say something. If you're going to pay Joe Rogan to make podcasts for your platform, you're eventually going to have to answer for what happens on those podcasts.
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