Kennedy Jr.’s anti– vaccine group Children’s Health Defense and The Unity Project, whose leadership board includes a veritable array of COVID-19 misinformers, including Peter McCullough, Paul Alexander, Tess Lawrie, and Pierre Kory.” Media Matters, a nonprofit that tracks right wing misinformation, noted that the rally Rogan promoted has sponsors that “include Robert F. According to CNN, at the time a Spotify spokesperson said that “Spotify prohibits content on the platform which promotes dangerous false, deceptive, or misleading content about COVID-19 that may cause offline harm and/or pose a direct threat to public health.” “We have a content policy and we do remove pieces that violate it.” The company has cited Rogan’s podcast in past earnings calls as an example of its successes building a revenue stream in podcasts.Īnother podcast that spread COVID-19 misinformation– hosted by conspiracy theorist Pete Evans– was removed by Spotify last year. “What I will say is we have 8 million creators, and hundreds of millions of pieces of content,” Ek said. Though Spotify has a responsibility to mitigate the spread of misinformation on its platform, the company presently has no misinformation policy.Īfter a similar incident in the past, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek refused to take action against Rogan’s podcast. With an estimated 11 million listeners per episode, JRE is the world’s largest podcast and has tremendous influence. We are a coalition of scientists, medical professionals, professors, and science communicators spanning a wide range of fields such as microbiology, immunology, epidemiology, and neuroscience and we are calling on Spotify to take action against the mass-misinformation events which continue to occur on its platform. Malone falsely claimed millions of people were “hypnotized” to believe certain facts about COVID-19, and that people standing in line to get tested as the omicron variant has driven record new cases of the virus was an example of “mass formation psychosis,” a phenomenon that does not exist. The December episode attracted attention in part because Dr. Rogan has repeatedly spread vaccine misinformation and discouraged vaccine use. "I will do my best to try to balance out these more controversial viewpoints with other people’s perspectives so we can maybe find a better point of view," he said.More than 260 doctors, nurses, scientists, health professionals and others have signed an open letter calling on the streaming media platform Spotify to “implement a misinformation policy” in the wake of controversy over podcaster Joe Rogan’s promotion of an anti-vaccine rally with discredited scientist Robert Malone in an episode published on December 31st. Rogan has issued an apology, pledging to include a wider array of opinions on future episodes. He was clear it's too early to tell, but that past "controversies" usually play out in "months not days." He also said he doesn't expect any "churn" or loss of customers due to the current podcast predicament. "We should've done it earlier and that's on me," he explained. When Neil Young pulled his music from the service last week, Spotify said it had pulled "over 20,000 podcast episodes related to COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic."Įk admitted that Spotify was late in publishing its content policy and took sole responsibility for not doing so sooner. ![]() Until this weekend, those policies weren't posted publicly as the company provided details while announcing it would add a "content advisory" to any podcast episodes that discuss COVID-19. ![]() Previously, Spotify has said it reviewed all episodes of JRE and none of them met the criteria for removal, despite several discussions of controversial topics - most notably COVID-19 vaccines and treatments. "While Joe has a massive audience, he also has to abide by those policies." He continued by saying the company doesn't bend its content rules to fit individual creators. ![]() "We're trying to balance creative expression with the safety of our users," Ek said. During the Q&A portion of the earnings call, he was directly asked about The Joe Rogan Experience. "The last several weeks have presented a number of learning opportunities," he said. CEO Daniel Ek began his prepared remarks by broadly addressing the company's "few notable days." Ek explained that Spotify is working to combat misinformation and that there's still work to be done. Spotify reported its Q4 2021 earnings today, and while the numbers showed a strong close to last year, the issue at the front of everyone's mind is Joe Rogan.
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