If Spotify is trying to effect or create the appearance of a willingness to reach a compromise in response to the recent singer pressure campaign, then it is doing nothing other than signal weakness.
Worse, they spent a lot of money and knew what they were getting, so it just makes them look like idiots to investors.
That’s not playing the victim. It’s the plain truth.
Although in this case, the action to remove the proverbial cigarette ads was taken voluntarily by the private media (magazine/etc., in the case of the analogy), and not done as a result of government coersion.
The analogy is really disingenuous at best, and pretty stupid at worst.
It is much smaller than restriction on advertising.
This user needs to be called out for consistently being needlessly inflammatory and adding little to nothing to the conversation.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Either way, the book burning analogy is beyond hyperbolic.
The point is simply to ground the conversation in reality, not in this peculiar language of extremes. Will spreading medical disinformation on a popular media platform kill people? Yes, probably. Is skepticism of mainstream medical narrative healthy? Yes, probably. Are those two things in tension with each other? Yes, usually. Should private platforms restrict content that will probably hurt people? Maybe, I don't know. Is this the moral or historical equivalent of book burning? No.
You could argue that in this particular case censorship probably won't even be effective. Rogan is seen as a something of a censorship martyr by quite a few people now, Streisand effect and all.
Also, there's the fact that most of the removed episodes have nothing to do with Covid-19.
Maybe you should be more cool headed yourself.
Perhaps it's just been a long week, but I don't really understand what you mean by "weakness" in this context.
Spotify is in an uncomfortable place right now. Some of the folks who generate some revenue for them aren't very happy with another guy who they bet on to generate even more revenue for them.
This, of course, made worse by the larger discussion around the pandemic.
Spotify is never going to win here. Regardless of what they do they will inevitably alienate a bunch of folks. The question for them is, "what's going to cause the least disruption to the revenue stream?"
I guess I'm not sure how (or why) it makes any difference, no matter what they choose to do.
Because they still carry a podcaster you disagree with and don't listen to? I don't see people alienated by Comcast because their basic cable subscription has FOX News and MSNBC.
Yes. And if they decide to stop carrying that podcaster (with whom I neither agree nor disagree, I have no basis for such a distinction), they will alienate a different set of people.
That was my whole point. They're damned if they do and damned if they don't.
Personally, I have no skin in that game (not as a user, an investor or a content creator), and if I liked popcorn (which is foul, disgusting stuff BTW) I'd be making some about now.
Edit: Fixed incorrect usage (podcaster/broadcaster).
I don't see it like that. This is their making.
They weren't damned when they signed Rogan, who was then already both controversial and very popular, and gave him $100m. Nobody forced it, and it was entirely predictable by Spotify that there would be more such controversies down the line. If they didn't want this catch 22, they didn't need to sign that deal.