Spotify Is Defending Alex Jones' Appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience”

I dealt with it by realizing that my own perception of the concepts of true and false can only be based on the consensus of other people I’m able to communicate with, and now that I can instantly reach billions of people I see it more like any side of any issue is “true” in the sense that “those ideas have been instantiated into our world and are something I have to deal with”. I don’t see any other solution, since how do you fight an idea? My country has been in wars against ideas for the entirety of my adult life and I’ve never seen them succeed.

The probabilities really aren't lower. CNN has fired a vanishingly low number of people over incorrect stories and in the rare cases that did occur, they were immediately hired by other outlets with identical viewpoints to CNN, where they continued writing exactly the same kinds of stories that got them fired previously (see Thomas Frank for an example).

The problem is there are more "reputable" sources that are also often wrong, and are just as harmful, if not more, for the same reason: wikipedia, Politifact, The John Oliver show.

In practice, censorship always comes with this bias:

Mainstream journalists and politicians can say all the lies they want, because they're usually not considered lies by whoever is in charge of the medium (Twitter, Spotify?, the government?).

Fringe movements don't have the popularity to pass off their lies as truth to the general population or the censor, they can only do it to their relatively small group of followers.

In the end, you end up with: popular lies are accepted, unpopular lies are censored. Sometimes unpopular truths get censored too.

Censorship is a problem itself, but a much bigger problem is biased censorship.

I think the framing is different. I hope folks aren't listening to true crime podcasts thinking "this murderer's making some good points".

I haven't seen a true crime show yet that gives murderers a platform to advocate for murder, that's not the context those shows operate in, the same goes for art.

But the families of the Sandy Hook children faced harassment after Jones spewed his crap, and his talk against vaccines and masks on Rogan, who has 190 million downloads per month, is going to make misinformation worse, make public health worse, and cost lives. This is not a joke or some bad rap lyrics. These conspiracies threaten people's safety from the virus and from him riling up extremists. I'm not paying a company that enables this.

Spotify isn’t the government. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean that anyone has to amplify that speech and broadcast it.

EDIT: Replying to child comments: The First Amendment only applies to the government; full stop. If a bakery can refuse service to a gay couple, and a restaurant can remove you for not following dress code, any private business can refuse you service. Period. You have freedom of speech and they have freedom of association. Those are both First Amendment rights. The right to refuse business is right there next to the right to spout off at the mouth.

Yeah, full protection from repercussions by the american government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_...

Unless of course he's violating any (or lots of) the exceptions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...

As spotify is not the american government it doesn't really apply here.

In addition even if they were the american government, that would only apply in america, which is in fact, not the entire world.

He can say whatever he wants without persecution from the government, but it doesn't mean we all have to give him the platform to be an asshole.