Spotify not caving under pressure to censor is admirable and important | Hacker News Reader

Spotify not caving under pressure to censor is admirable and important

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51 pointsnomilk38 comments

I don't understand the controversy. So Rogan had a kook or two on the air, kooks with credentials who promoted non-consensus opinions. Is that the problem? I mean, listeners should be able to determine for themselves whether something is believable and/or interesting. I listen to Rogan often and he doesn't directly contradict his guests but you can tell when he's not buying what they're selling. You can also tell he's not the brightest crayon in the box, so you should take what you hear there (and literally everywhere else in the world) with a chunk of salt. It's ludicrous and insulting to say Spotify should be the one deciding what ideas people are allowed to hear as they go about their day and form opinions about the world around them.

Guest, not "kook". Why use the term "kook" when all that happened - and hopefully will continue to happen - is that Rogan allowed criticism of the regime by credible sources to be aired. The sources are credible because they have built a reputation on their knowledge in their fields of expertise. As to whether their criticism of the regime is valid is up to the listener to decide, not up to the censor or any (ironically-named) "fact checker". It is certainly not up to media talking heads who just parrot whatever they get fed by the regime and would gladly tell you your country has always been at war with Eurasia.

Yes, it's up to the listener to judge whether the criticism is valid, and if it's wildly disconnected from my understanding of reality, I label the speaker a kook. I didn't mean to imply the kook label was objective.

But spotify does censor, they removed a bunch of JRE's podcasts, they removed a bunch of maga/sexual/gore songs. Who knows what other censorship they do, this is just ones I've seen in the news.

Yeah as an example of the maga censorship they removed songs by Bryson Gray for anti-lgbtq themes

I don’t care for his music myself but personally I don’t agree with censorship

I’d say their decision has a lot more to do with not wanting to piss off their $100mm asset than any sort of principled stand.

What if Spotify solved this the same way YouTube and Facebook do: an unskippable message (before and after the podcast) stating where to get actual information about COVID.

I think its less effective, since those who want to consume it will still press through, and their 'giant megaphone' has broad reach. Though perhaps some will actually read it

How do you define "actual information about SARS2"? Who makes the definition? This issue has been politicised and polarised so much that "actual information" is hard to come by. Compare the laissez-faire approach of e.g. Sweden with the authoritarian approach in many places in the USA and tell me who was right. Looking at the results the answer should be "Sweden" but that would most likely not be what the "actual information about SARS2" would indicate.

What kind of source is this random tweet?

Hes an internet personality. At the time of writing it had 42k likes. I dont know it's appropriate for HN, but it's a computer science "influencer" weighing in

Depends on your perspective, I guess.

It would be wrong for Neil Young to say “Remove Joe Rogan from this platform”.

But it’s perfectly fine for Neil to say “Remove me from this platform”.

Moving slowly but continuously closer to the point where objectivity and common sense have lost their cultural foundation. That’s the recipe for true anarchy, like it or not. Society has a glue, some think the glue doesn’t matter. When right wingers in the US feel they have more affinity with Russia than mainstream American society, you really have to wonder about the cool aid

Sad to see Willie turned into a bully.

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