The drive towards censorship that seems to have revved up in the last few years is an astonishing change. I'm old enough to remember the utopian thinking about the web's planned positive effects on free speech and free discourse: now it seems that a new and, to my mind, strange censoriousness seems to have settled in.
When I read Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, I don't think I understood how broadly applicable it would be. His follow-up, with Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, is also applicable to the censorship movements afoot in many companies (including publishing companies).
Censorship is the suppression of speech period. It can be done by the government, private institutions or even individuals. You can even censor yourself ( self-censorship ).
I don't know for sure, but I'd be willing to bet a bit that if some prince from a land far away bought out Twitter and took to moving the workforce ideology to the right and censored, I mean curated, left leaning ideology from the platform a good number of people would cry foul.
Do you also consider it censorship when the New York Times fires or disciples a columnist who keeps printing incorrect information? Spotify is the publisher here and they are responsible for making sure that their products (such as the Joe Rogan shoe since Spotify bought it) provide truthful information.
The simple truth of the matter is that Joe Rogan has a tendency for stating falsehoods on his show, and this in turn can result in harm to Spotify's users. For instance, Joe Rogan literally just spread a bunch of misinformation about the wildfires (https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/18/media/joe-rogan-apologizes/in...) while broadcasting on Spotify. He clearly needs some help fact checking and editing his shows so that they can provide more truthful information.
Why shouldn't the New York Times fire or disciple a columnist with the exact same factual track record as Joe Rogan?
Funny how you linked cnn, a major source of misinformation itself.
> Why shouldn't the New York Times fire or disciple a columnist with the exact same factual track record as Joe Rogan?
Is Joe Rogan an employee of Spotify? I don't think he works for spotify. So your example doesn't work.
Lets play a game, between the jre, cnn and nytimes, who pushes the least amount of misinformation? If you are honest, the answer is the jre. Between the jre, cnn and the nytimes, who pushes the least amount of misinformation to start wars and kill countless innocent people. The answer is the jre once again.
"Disinformation", "misinformation" and other propaganda terms are so readily adopted by fans of misinformation/disinformation.
The JRE is entertainment in the same sense that Last Week Tonight with John Oliver is entertainment. Yes, it is intended to be entertaining, but it also tries to sell itself as being informative.
As a second point, Joe Rogan is now effectively an employee (or contractor if you prefer) of Spotify. Spotify is paying him a lot of money to run his show on the Spotify platform.
> The JRE is entertainment in the same sense that Last Week Tonight is entertainment. Yes, it is intended to be entertaining, but it also tries to sell itself as being informative.
Informative isn't the same thing as factual. And you have to be an absolute moron to take anything John Oliver says seriously. But I don't think HBO should ban him. Funny how nobody is demanding John Oliver to be banned and yet, he involves himself in american politics and he's from britain. But even still, I don't think he should be banned.
> As a second point, Joe Rogan is now effectively an employee (or contractor if you prefer) of Spotify. Spotify is paying him a lot of money to run his show on the Spotify platform.
Spotify is selling a product ( JRE ) on their platform. Doesn't make the product an employee of spotify. But maybe I'm wrong. But that makes it even worse since spotify employees are threatening a fellow employee.
This kind of thinking from JRE fans is exactly why the show is problematic to me. You just made inaccurate statements about the credibility of various media companies and figures while also using that as evidence Joe Rogan is better while also stating he’s just entertainment and shouldn’t be expected to be factual.
You have crafted a new reality to justify your position and that’s exactly what Joe Rogan did when he falsely accused leftists of starting those fires.
The Joe Rogan Experience isn't a news program. The early days involved getting high, being sponsored by Fleshlight, and having profanity-laden arguments.
In that sense Spotify doesn't need to ensure its 'product' provides truthful information.
It's on society to not treat entertainment as News. Unfortunately, people going to JRE for news isn't Spotify or JRE's fault. It's a cultural problem and you need to solve it at a structural or cultural level.
If the Joe Rogan Experience isn't a news program, then why do Joe and his guests make so many factual claims (a number of which turn out to be incorrect).
At a certain point, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, it's fair to call it a duck. And the JRE certainly tries to present itself as factual and not a complete parody.
I am having trouble imagining a conversation between two people that wouldn’t be considered a news program by your standards. I guess something completely made up like a DnD session?
Spotify is quite literally an entertainment provider. They can provide any content they want. They are not a newspaper and have no obligation to only promote and host content that matches some folks views and honestly I’m thankful for it.
How boring the world would be if all entertainment was just someone dictating facts about things in a monotone voice that appealed to everyone.
Did this work in court when Alex Jones tried to claim that his show is pure comedy and stage persona should not be liable because it’s just a fictional character only played by Jones? Will Joe Rohan start to claim that no reasonable person would trust information on his podcast?
I wonder when people will finally understand that outside of mathematics, there is no "truth" and "falsehood". There is only statements that have sufficient evidence to be considered a fact, or statements that lack evidence or even statements that go against evidence while lacking supporting evidence (Lets call these statements "Trumpian statements").
If we establish, that a statement is "really true" only if a celestial being, aware of all the facts, would consider this statement true, then pretty much all statements in the world have an unknown for their truth value. The error also can't be established. What people thought "really true" a hundred years ago, we now laugh about. Same will happen to many other things.
Censorship of "falsehoods" is a very dangerous concept. It prevents innovation. Einstein was essentially a heretic. His theories were bold and completely absurd to most people back then. Should we have censored them?
However, for many many statements, a lack of evidence has no impact on the truthfulness. Just because I can't prove something, doesn't make it false. Just because there is a mountain of counter-evidence, doesn't make a statement false, it just makes it less likely to be "really true". However, there could be a surprising piece of evidence, that trumps (pun intended) all existing counter-evidence.
If you want to censor, then you essentially force society into coherence. That is good in the short-term, as it reduces conflict, but very very bad in the long-term, as it suppresses non-standard opinions (i.e. innovation and free expression).
A much better approach than censorship is to create a channel "What Joe Rogan Got Wrong" and list all his supposedly falsehoods and explain the mountain of evidence against it. That of course takes effort. But yeah, the quick solution is rarely the best.
It's interesting that you mention Einstein and physics. Science is basically the most censored field out there. Every single published paper goes through rigorous peer-review and will not be published if other scientists think it's flawed. I think science would be much worse off if they threw that peer review away and journals like Nature simply published whatever article showed up on their door.
Edit: Due to some confusion in the comments. I just want to clarify some of the terminology here. When I say that science is "censored" I mean it is "censored" in the same way that Spotify is "censoring" Joe Rogan. Nobody is stopping any scientist from posting their papers anywhere they want online and there is nobody stopping Joe Rogan from taking his show and broadcasting it elsewhere. They are only being "censored" in the sense that the mainstream publishers have high truth quality standards and some shows (and scientific papers) don't meet those standards and thus publishers will refuse to publish the low quality material.
> Science is basically the most censored field out there.
Science isn't censored. It's the opposite. It is open and it is tested. You are allowed to claim/hypothesize whatever you want. And you and others are allowed to test it.
There was a time when science was censored. Such as when people started to hypothesize that the earth revolved around the sun. Or when germany started censoring "jewish science".
You are misattributing "testing one's claims" with censoring one's claims. Science doesn't censor.
But that is something very different. Nobody censors "new ideas". The censorship in science is focused on journals. I.e. if you want your idea to be published through a standard, accepted channel, it needs to be extensively peer-reviewed. And this is important, for obvious reasons.
However, nothing prevents you from publishing your idea on the web, and people have done that and succeeded. There were some brilliant ideas (missing the link) that just got thrown out in the wild. But if the idea is truly brilliant, some other scientist will notice and make sure it gets reviewed anyhow.
The "censorship" (I wouldn't call it that) in science doesnt happen at the publishing stage. When you have a great idea, it is bound to succeed, because nobody can afford to ignore you. The problem is getting there. How do you get the idea? Funding... Science funding is utterly broken. I.e. people research the wrong things for the wrong reasons all the time. This needs to be fixed, however it has nothing to do with censorship. This is just bias.
Spotify is not a scientific journal. It's purpose is not to decide the truthfulness of its content. It should not publish content that breaks a law. If no law is broken, Spotify has neither an obligation, nor should they intervene/censor the content.
To be fair, the web is not the issue but content distribution.
Joe Rogan is free to put together his own site with anything he feels like posting. If instead Joe Rogan wants to use someone else's site to make available his musings then he still has to deal with the owner of that site.
It's like buying a house vs booking a hotel: you might feel more comfortable in the hotel but even if you're a paying customer you need to abide by the service provider's rules.
The difference is Spotify is paying Joe Rogan $100M for his content. He's not a "guest in a hotel", they entered into a mutually beneficial contract to host his content. Spotify is using this to grow their userbase.
I agree for the web im general, but I don't think it applies in this case, because he was free to say whatever he wanted, but when he agreed on the deal he also agreed to represent Spotify, and therefore all its employees. It's like a sponsorship.
No offense, but this strawman is super telling. I don't advocate for
the censorship of these employees, even if I do find what they're doing morally reprehensible.
If you feel it should be "unacceptable behavior contract or no" for them to express their right to free speech simply because you disagree with their politics then yes you are advocating censorship.
It's possible to hold two beliefs at once. I detest their ideology but I wouldn't dream of censoring them. If you're projecting the belief that everyone you disagree with should be censored, then you should take a look in the mirror.
I'm saying their ideology is unacceptable (anyone calling for censorship should be shunned), not the fact they're speaking their mind.
Unless you have a union and a contract with your employer, you’re an at will employee with no recourse (at least in the US). You’re free to your opinion, but also to find employment elsewhere if you take issue with your organization’s partnerships. Freedom of speech doesn’t translate to guaranteed employment while demanding editorial control of your employer’s platform.
It should be noted that union organizing activities are protected in the US from employer retaliation.
I hope Joe Rogan sticks to his guns and refuse to change anything. Obviously he said some controversial things in the past(I am personally more annoyed how he drones about elk meat and health supplements) but it's how he is. He doesn't censor himself and he says what's on his mind for better or worst.
Fuck cancel culture! Fuck this type of politics! Believing everything that may offend you or is outside your thinking should be censor is absolute garbage...
That being said, he can be a meat-head dbag at times. So I listen to his opinions with a grain of salt.
I think what’s dumb is that cancel culture reeks of class conflict and elitism.
None of these people would survive on a construction crew. If they can’t handle the talk on Rogan’s podcast, they’d perish sitting around a lunch truck.
It’s a freaking conversation. This isn’t dissolving society. If you don’t like what they’re saying, stop listening! What a joyless existence if you feel the need to protest a podcast.
As someone who works in the actual music business, I can confidently say that Digital Music News is not taken seriously as a news source and has an awful reputation for clickbait, fake comments, and outright lies. As I don’t see any actual evidence or new information in this article, I’m surprised it’s passing the HN community filters.
Since HN moderators may not be aware of this blog’s reputation, I would encourage them to consider bypassing links from here and instead linking to direct sources as they do with other dubious blogs. Notice how there are no real sources for the actual new claims in this article?
Posting from a throwaway account as the owner of this blog has a nasty reputation for attacking naysayers.
As a frequent reader of 'Digital Music News' their articles rarely get more than 2-4 comments per article for the lifespan of the article. IF ANY. I'm starting to suspect that there may be something funny going on with their comments section:
This Joe Rogan article currently has 258 comments. They almost all conform to cliches of puerile, immature bickering that one would associate with the worst of online discourse. In short, the antithesis of something like Hacker News, which I love for it's mature, focused discussions.
An online catfight of this magnitude for this website seems VERY out of the ordinary. I wouldn't say that this site has any kind of cohesive or reoccurring members who frequent the comments (As far as I can see, and with no hard data). My suspicion is that there may be some funny business involving bots for a lot of these posters.
It don't even see repeats between the comment names, which you would expect to see if 1 or two people were going back and forth with one another. Though I do see slight variations in names like 'Micro Penus' and 'Tiny Pen15'.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to test for or detect malicious actors/bots/etc in an instance like this? Or is it likely that 258 bickering people all came out of the woodwork for this single article?
They are mostly fake. The owner of the blog uses tons of fake accounts to promote his clickbait, and any real community that has formed around it is super toxic. I’d encourage you to find another blog to read that covers these issues.
>While Rogan is politically liberal, he is — argues former Obama 2008 campaign strategist and Rogan listener Shant Mesrobian — culturally conservative, by which he does not mean that Rogan holds conservative views on social issues (again, he is pro-choice and pro-LGBT rights). He means that Rogan exudes culturally conservative signals: He likes MMA fighting, makes crude jokes, hunts, and just generally fails to speak in the lingo of the professional managerial class and coastal elites. And it is those cultural standards, rather than political ones, that make Rogan anathema to elite liberal culture because, Mesrobian argued in a viral Twitter thread, liberals care far more about proper culture signaling than they do about the much harder and more consequential work of actual politics.
There are some things he said that might be construed as supporting incorrect political opinions. The stuff you refer to is just smut and garbage. Spotify employees are ok with that.
This is all a wonderful show of free speech. Employees have a voice. Spotify can make decisions. JRE can have a podcast and if Spotify doesn’t want to publish it, he can go elsewhere or start his own pirate ship.
The content really just doesn’t matter. There needs to be the ability for this entire debate and protest to go down and it seems like there is.
I have tried to listen to his podcasts and I dont understand the hype, but I think employees of Spotify should act according to their ethics. And I also believe that of more tech employees had ethics and empathy internet would not have turned that way. Money isn't everything.
He lets people run their mouths for hours. That means they run out of talking points, realize they're going in loops, and sometimes say something worthwhile. He has on some people who really are just awful, but even they succumb to the banality of their own nonsense. Some of them turn out to have no substance after that, but sometimes they surprise you.
I listened to a few episodes, but don't find that his guests surprise me enough to sit through it.
Because he can have a 3 hour conversation about politics, and not immediately force the conversation to one view point? That wasn’t revolutionary as recently as 10 years ago, but now?
Rogan has had Elon Musk, Lex Fridman, Sam Harris, Brian Cox, Neil Tyson, and a ton of other celebrities and geniuses on his show. A lot of fascinating people.
I actually suspect that this could work out as an excellent promotion for Rogan if the employees strike. He will lose a small amount of more far-left people, but some people who were not into YouTube for whatever reason will probably decide to tune in. Just from all of the hype.
There ought to be a non-profit, user & creator funded podcast/video/publishing platform that allows anything not terrorism, kiddie porn, unsafe medical panaceas, universally criminal, spam, or obviously inciting violence/genocide. Corporate inverted totalitarianism (Youtube cancelling channels by AI) and illiberal, PC bikeshedding employees picking-and-choosing creators are the death of free expression and debate. Furthermore, corporations are replacing public commons with walled-gardens governed by arbitrary, sometimes secret, rules.
It is interesting to
me that the same group isn’t up in arms about the many other works Spotify provides containing demeaning and abusive lyric content toward women and many others. I’ve never seen or heard Rogan, but it is hard to believe his stuff is as bad as many song lyrics already on Spotify for years.
In my opinion this makes these employees extremely hypocritical.
Or to put it another way: employees of digital publisher demand that the publisher exercise editorial power.
It's not very different from a newspaper editing its writers, and Rogan could go back to indepdently operating if the editorial isn't worth the massive exclusivity deal that Spotify pays him.
How is this not more left wing technologists trying to use their technology roles to de-platform right wing perspectives they don’t agree with? Literally threatening to quit if they can’t impose editorial content policing on the other side. And you wonder why politicians are about to yank the Section 230 rug out from under these technology companies? Don’t cry when your federally granted indemnity disappears my friends.
Joe Rogan isn't even right wing - he's clearly a progressive (literally a Bernie Bro) - it's just that he's usually willing to talk to conservatives on his show.
Yeah, I’m not right wing either, I just actually believe in free speech for everyone. Even people I don’t agree with. This new movement to censor and silence opposing perspectives is disgusting and should frighten people. Win with the merits of your ideas and perspectives, not by silencing the people who oppose you by claiming moral superiority.
I've been saying this is coming for years now, and honestly, it seems like people are really starting to speak up. I'm happy to see more comments like yours.
Right, but they’re angry because Rogan occasionally brings right wing people on his show and lets them speak. Can you imagine? Allowing opposing perspectives to speak...
This comment section seems to have been brigaded in a way that I've almost never seen on HN. Something about platforms removing white supremacist views really fires these "free speech" people up, yet I never see them raging about Trump's censorship of the CDC (not being allowed to mention climate change, for example).
I can somewhat understand the point of the employees here, but ultimately, I think it's a symptom of a larger problem - of easy propagation misinformation, with very little oversight. When someone makes a veritably false claim, like "they've arrested left-wing people for lighting those forest fires," it is incredibly difficult to retract that statement; and even now, retracting such statements doesn't change the impact the original statement had. People are still going to believe the original statement, regardless of its truth, or they won't see the correction - especially when, in this case, the original audio was not corrected, and the apology issued separately. The original could remain unchallenged in the original audio, and someone who doesn't know the context or follow the content creator may not know that the claim was false - assuming good faith. Or, the clip could be pulled out of context, with no apology or correction, to tout that statement, to push an agenda. So now, even with a veritably false claim, you can potentially demonize the "left-wing people" intentionally or not - and I would argue that the original intention does not matter.
Joe Rogan has been given a platform, and he needs to use it responsibly. I'm still on the fence over whether or not Spotify should enforce that he uses the platform responsibly. When do you draw the line? At what point does his right to use Spotify as a platform outweigh the consequences of using the platform irresponsibly, potentially - or indirectly - causing harm? Inviting guests that promote transphobic onto his platform seems innocent enough, but transphobia is a major issue contesting the country, even ignoring veritably false claims being made about transpeople, and people have died over this conflict. If the platform is used irresponsibly, and veritably false information is propagated by the guest on his platform, is Joe Rogan responsible for that? What if that misinformation is what causes someone to commit a crime against transpeople? At what point should Joe Rogan, the one who promoted misinformation on a platform he controls, and that many people listen to, be held responsible for the consequences of what (and how) he disseminates to the people? Does his right to say false things outweigh the right of others to live without fear or persecution?
I have yet to come up with an answer, because I don't know what the best solution is yet.
"Does his right to say false things outweigh the right of others to live without fear or persecution"
No one has granted a right to live without fear. Fear is an emotional response.
I don't think a general non-persecution right exists.
A right to free speech exists from government persecution. A right to be treated equally based on gender exists at the government level.
The key point is spofity has a right to offer Joe money to use their platforms. Employees who disagree based on politics and threaten to quit working is new. If the company decides to replace them I don't believe they are in a legal position to strike.
> I don't think a general non-persecution right exists.
Yes, and no; one can be criticized for membership of a social group, but when people take action against the social group, I believe that can start to step into the territory of hate crimes, but I don't know if I'd consider that implying a right.
> The key point is spofity has a right to offer Joe money to use their platforms. Employees who disagree based on politics and threaten to quit working is new. If the company decides to replace them I don't believe they are in a legal position to strike.
This, I agree with. My original post was about the morals of the move, both on Spotify's part, and the Employees' part, but I have very little doubt about the legal aspect of it.
Spotify can offer Joe Rogan money. The employees can protest this. Spotify can perform editorial control. The question is, should they?
If the employees are protesting in good faith and not employing violence to coerce their employer, why shouldn't they?
If Spotify feels editorial control is in their business interests, and it doesn't violate their contract with Joe Rogan, why shouldn't they exercise it?
It's odd that so many people are complaining so vehemently about a situation in which the rights that Hacker News usually considers sacrosanct - voluntary contracts, capitalism and free speech, are not actually being undermined.
If spotify management wishes to end an agreement with Joe they will. Why should spotify management end that agreement? Because a group of employees want it?
Let's say that happens. But another group of employees may feel the opposite and start protesting for Joe. Now what do you?
>Let's say that happens. But another group of employees may feel the opposite and start protesting for Joe. Now what do you?
There's no obligation that Spotify management consider or concede to all future employee demands if they choose to consider or concede to any group's demands in the present. They'll do whatever makes the best business sense to them at the time, which today might mean breaking this agreement, and tomorrow might mean defending another one.
> Employees who disagree based on politics and threaten to quit working is new
labour strikes have existed for decades. Primarily for better working conditions of course, but also environmental issues or equal civil rights and so on.
What's new isn't that employees use their bargaining power for political or social causes, it's that they have more success with it in tech or other knowledge sectors. That's a function of there being relatively few workers. The managerial and professional class has become aware of the fact that they're hard to replace, and employers actually can't fire them all, in other words the top 15% have figured out that they don't actually share any goals with the top 0.1% percent, but that they're in quite a unique position to demand what they think is right.
“Given” a platform? Spotify is a downgrade from the reach he had before; Spotify paid for The Joe Rogan Experience, with terms, in order to expand their audience and you don’t think they might want to preserve what they paid for? The solution is probably to not tell other people how to live their lives and what to do with their businesses. A controversial proposition these days, I know.
Whether or not Spotify is a downgrade is not the point here; the point is that Joe Rogan has a platform that allows him to propagate his message to the mass, and that Spotify has a role in that. That is all. The same could be said if he was uploading videos to YouTube, or hosting a website. At some point, some company helped him disseminate the message he wanted to spread - in the case of hosting a website, for example, a hosting provider, or a domain name service, or an ISP. I think it's nonsensical and potentially dangerous to say an ISP is responsible for what Joe Rogan has said, but on the other end of the spectrum, YouTube or Spotify has to do some sort of filtering on the content they help disseminate. How should they decide, then?
The problem with the latter part of your comment is that it assumes that everyone lives on separate islands, and that what one person does has no impact on the other people around them. It does. It's alright to say that we shouldn't dictate peoples lives or businesses, but there's a point that that breaks down - if we can't dictate people's lives, why do we jail people?
We don’t have laws to dictate people’s lives; we have laws to hold people to a standard and clarify process. This has nothing to do with law though, this is an internal dispute in a private organization that certainly has no business telling others how to live, in particular the guy they signed on to help expand their audience and their corporation’s paying customers.
The contract between Spotify and Joe Rogan represents a consensual trade: money for exclusive distribution of The Joe Rogan Experience. YouTube choosing to host The Joe Rogan Experience prior to this was also a trade of sorts, both made money from the arrangement, but it was a bit less airtight because YouTube has and does try to present itself as a platform just about anyone can publish on and doesn’t often make these deals. The distribution wasn’t the especially valuable part though, it was the man himself and the show Joe put together. Spotify didn’t approach Joe with a dump truck full of money to serve as Joe’s neutral platform of choice wherein Joe will follow all the same platform policies as the other shows. They approached Joe with a dump truck full of money because that was how much they valued him and the show he put together and he didn’t do anything that especially offended them (where “them” would be the people that own and control Spotify).
I don’t want to tell you what to do with your life, but I prefer to tend to my own garden before worrying about the state of another’s for I find that the sorts of people that tell others how they should live are charlatans keeping their own unkempt gardens out of sight. Nobody can nor has the moral right to control the actions of another.
When I read Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, I don't think I understood how broadly applicable it would be. His follow-up, with Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, is also applicable to the censorship movements afoot in many companies (including publishing companies).