Spotify employees threaten to strike if Joe Rogan podcasts aren’t edited/removed
digitalmusicnews.com
digitalmusicnews.com
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).
That's within their right of free speech, and Joe Rogan has equal free speech rights to make counter-demands. You believe in free speech don't you?
It should be noted that union organizing activities are protected in the US from employer retaliation.
I'm saying their ideology is unacceptable (anyone calling for censorship should be shunned), not the fact they're speaking their mind.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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...).
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.
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.
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.
Well I guess I'm a moron. I thought his show on the Uighurs in China was pretty informative.
> Funny how nobody is demanding John Oliver to be banned and yet, he involves himself in american politics and he's from britain.
John Oliver is an American citizen that lives in America. Who cares where he was born?
Some people do, obviously. In this case, it's a bit on the nose...
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.
How boring the world would be if all entertainment was just someone dictating facts about things in a monotone voice that appealed to everyone.
[1] https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/alex-joness-attorneys-...
[2] https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/local/court-upholds-alex...
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.
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.
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.
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?
https://theintercept.com/2020/09/22/as-joe-rogans-platform-g...
There's a certain cohort inside all these tech companies that despises what Rogan represents.
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 listened to a few episodes, but don't find that his guests surprise me enough to sit through it.
In my opinion this makes these employees extremely hypocritical.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
Maybe the question should be why shouldn't 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.
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.
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.
Not so sure they're that hard to replace. There's always the following:
* The unemployed, especially those displaced/affected by offshoring
* Slightly less qualified but trainable
* Those with criminal background issues, but are otherwise well qualified.
All categories would be served well through a staffing firm specializing in handling these kind of issues.