Spotify competing with YouTube isn't the root problem. The people calling for censorship are the problem.
This is the latest attack in an ongoing war on free speech. We are losing our freedoms. Today it's Joe Rogan's speech tomorrow it's yours.
This is the latest attack in an ongoing war on free speech. We are losing our freedoms. Today it's Joe Rogan's speech tomorrow it's yours.
If anything, Joe Rogan is giving up his free speech. No one is taking it.
Anyone can make a podcast and put it out. Zero stopping them other than maybe money to buy a device to record and send it.
YouTube was really the only other platform option for mass distribution at JRE scale.
He sold out and this is what happens to sellouts.
https://www.workandmoney.com/s/joe-rogans-house-austin-texas...
Why isn't anyone who think they have something to say that might be bad for business or controversial not just self-publish? It's normal that distributors and publications would be unsure about publishing controversial stuff that could be bad PR and bad for business, so self-publishing seems like the way to go.
1. He has an exclusive deal with Spotify preventing it.
2. To reach masses (masses != HN audience) you need to be on Spotify/Apple Music/YouTube. Not technically, but practically, it's a must.
The counter argument is that censorship is bad in all its forms. It’s one I and many others support.
In the status quo private people and companies are allowed to not accept contributions on their websites. This is not censorship, this is their right as runners of a plattform. Joe rogan can always go and create his own if he finds that no one wants to publish him.
I don't see how enabling the government to force people to publish speech they don't want to say isn't 100% worse than what we have now. It reminds me of stories from the soviet union.
But that's not what happened. Spotify is taking down content for financial reasons. They don't like the heat they are getting from the press, musicians, and yes maybe perhaps the government. And companies have always made editorial decisions for financial reasons.
If you think we should further carve into people's freedoms to associate (or, in this case, freedom of the press to publish or refrain from publishing Rogan) in the interests of broader freedom, what should that law look like and on what underlying philosophy should it be based?
There are obviously limits to free speech and there always have been. Can I perjure myself in front of a jury? Can I yell "fire" in a crowded theater? Each of these actions would have a consequence, and it is the act of knowingly provoking that consequence that is prohibited, not the act of speech itself.
It's probably the worst example as this was the metaphor was by the government when people were passing out anti war flyers opposing the draft during WWI. These same people were tried and convicted under the espionage and sedition acts. The judges unanimously sided with the government.
If I think there's a fire, or a problem, damn straight I'm going to speak up, and this definitely feels like Spotify is taking down things "the public", no court even required how great, find distasteful in the moment.
I think it's just a strange choice of word. Joe Rogan has the right to publish his podcasts uncensored. So he's not really being censored in the "free speech" sense. He still has the freedom to put his content uncensored on the internet for all to listen too if they choose.
Spotify has the right to choose what they publish or don't publish.
I think talking about censorship and free speech seems beyond the point to me, since I don't see any of those rights being taken away. And since I don't see the premise being true, I can't really take seriously the argument.
Instead, if you're just against the people who are saying that Joe Rogan is misleading and being harmful to society, and that by promoting and publishing his content, Spotify is also doing similar harm and thus they choose to boycott the companies products then discuss that. If you think people are making a baseless fuss about the harmful effects of his podcast on society and the efforts to fight COVID then bring that up instead.
> The counter argument is that censorship is bad in all its forms. It’s one I and many others support
I just want to point out that's not a counter-argument, that's a conclusion, and the argument for it is missing. If you want to make a point to the conclusion you need to explain the premise that you use to arrive there.
The problem here is Spotify are screwing up their editorial responsibilities. Joe Rogan has reached the sort of critical mass where he gets to decide what is in the public's interest to talk about. These faceless censors at Spotify aren't qualified to do that, or qualified to decide what is and isn't misinformation. They are acting foolishly outside their wheelhouse of creating platforms. They are screwing up by taking down interesting and entertaining content, making decisions that is going to get a very large audience upset with them.
They pay Rogan because he is better at this sort of decision than they are. This is a poor follow up.
1. to not lose as many customers as possible who are outraged with Rogan — maybe they did the math based on advertising profiling.
2. to not lose Joe Rogan, one of the most popular shows they have, and thus, customers/users.
3. to not spark further outrage from other popular artists who might leave.
4. to protect their name and brand.
5. to avoid being removed from the Apple App Store when Apple eventually lays the ban hammer down because "their app is spreading misinfo", just like the Alex Jones debacle that empowered Apple to assess app availability based on their political whims and agreement (abhorrent by the way). This goes for other platforms.
6. to avoid banks who manage their funds from canceling them for supporting a show, person, or stance the bank disagrees with.
We are truly in an ugly mess of global political wars where even the slightest wrong move in speech/expression will completely ruin a company or person's ability to survive—well, maybe survival isn't the issue, but undue harm is.
This is especially on the Left, who are too ready and willing to spark that ruin, viewing legal systems and power only as a tool to control their opposition, who has valid stances on myriad topics. On the Right, they complain a lot, but at least they aren't using any means necessary to actively change the fundamental course of people's lives, livelihood, and futures due to what boils down to a political disagreement in the realm of speech/expression.
We can't pretend that science is inherently fact just because it leads to forming facts later, when it has always been described as a a fallible process of discovery, leading to theories, which are either supported by evidence or amply refuted.
In this case, the doctors Rogan hosted, along with 100k+ other doctors globally have refuted the mainstream claims around vaccines and the handling of treatment — enough to require panels of discussion and enormous scrutiny towards the likes of Fauci and others who are claiming to "be science," in nothing other than pure dripping hubris and condescension towards anyone who dares to question them.
This is one problem we should be addressing, in addition to the censor-or-fail mentality affecting nearly every publishing platform.
If you look politically, it is just as true, and historically much more so I feel from the American right, which has normally had the church and the puritans on its side, and has always fought to get sex, LGBTQ, minorities, and even science removed from popular channels of discourse.
Also, as someone who follows the science, I'm not seeing 100k+ researchers with published data refuting the science. Doctors are not all scientist. Most practitioners have their own belief system, often from their own daily biases. And in the medical science community, it turns out, those things are being investigated, but are still far from being unambiguous and evidence backed. The policy makers are taking risks one way or another, because they're having to make decisions with limited scientific analysis, data, and experiments.
When you think of scientific consensus, what do you think it means? It is a confidence score in the current state of data and experiment. It is an assessment of given what we know today, what is most likely true. You can take bets against it, because it is probabilities and not certainties, science is always probabilistic unlike religion. But if you're a policy maker, taking a bet against the current odds seem like a gamble you shouldn't be making.
Thus from my stance, this is all political, and science is doing the right thing, and most policy makers that follows scientific consensus are just playing it safe with the odds.
The people who are trying to discredit science and the consensus are taking political bets, they want to discredit things to gain power, in the off chance the consensus is wrong, they win big politically, in the many more likely odds they'd be wrong, most people won't notice and it won't make the news.
The effect of it all though, from my point of view, is actually that it is used once again by the right as a way to convince people science is wrong all along. Which goes back to my initial take, historically, the right has always tried to silence science, and this to me is just another attempt at discrediting its processes and misrepresenting it's propositions and stance. It's trying to get people to instead believe that the political leaders and key scientists that have become agent of politics are more trustworthy than science itself, and that they now should listen to them exclusively for the real truth.
Going straight to politics, which is what really upsets people about Rogan, the standard here is people who spent multiple years of sustained campaigning confidently speculating that the US president is in league with the Russians. Or people before that who spent years onfidently speculating that the president was a Muslim trying to institute the Sharia in Texas or something crazy like that. I don't really remember the sillyness that far back in the Obama years. Joe Rogan at least has credentialed guests and lets them talk off-narritive. In that CNN horse-paste interview he had a CNN guy on who could have challenged him back or defended the position.
Rogan has much, much higher standards than what has traditionally been done for politics. He's probably doing better than traditional news reporting in other areas too.
Political appointees making public statements isn’t the government asking anyone to do anything.
While it may not be in legal terms, many see it as an opportunity to greenlight the bypassing of legal/legislative procedures, especially by those who consider the current administration(s) political allies.
As an example, Jen Psaki has stated in the past that they are working with social media to "handle disinformation", and the likes of wokie Zuckerberg wouldn't hesitate to operate outside of Congress or courts to satisfy the whims of his masters.
If the government had made a law making it illegal for Spotify to carry Joe Rogan, that would have been censorship. None of the conditions were even close.
Spotify is a private institution, and has the option of carrying content, or not, at their editorial discretion. You can disagree with their choice, and if you do, the proper redress is to put pressure on Spotify, not to claim it's government censorship, which it's not.
Of course, I could just start my own magazine if I want to publish my own content, but that would obviously be ridiculously cost prohibitive. And this was the norm for magazines, radio, TV. There was always strong editorial control by corporations.
Boom comes the internet, and all of that goes away. As long as you can convince your web host to host you, you can say what you like.
But now podcasts and content creators are making deals with big corporations again, and those corporations have the right to make the same decisions the magazine editors did. It's not censorship. It's how things have always been.
You can always build your own website, and the government will not interfere. There is your freedom of speech. Your web host might, but even that hasn't been an obstacle for extreme left/right wing sites, at least not so far. Worse comes to worse you can seed your content on bittorrent.
At the expense of huge barriers of entry for people to discover that content, or even care bothering with the hoops you would have to jump through to find something you're interested in, to the less tech savvy.
This is partly why the removal of content after its publication due to political pressure and threats of coercion is fundamentally the problem that needs to be addressed.
Whether it's semantically "censorship" or not is debatable, but the ill effects it has on society are irrefutable, by communicating:
1. these views need to be taken down.
2. these views need to be silenced.
3. the consumers of this information are "domestic terrorists" or "completely stupid", as readily communicated by major pundits on the Left, and at times, by our own leaders (Biden, Trudeau).
4. the 100,000+ global outspoken doctors who agree with these controversial views are fringe, misguided, deserving of losing their licenses, etc.
... All 4 reek of condescension and political bias in a way that damages and divides society to the extent that massive psychological harm is inflicted on millions of people seeking good information who want to be left alone, and risks enforcing a single stream of thought where panels of experts or public dialogue are discouraged.
That should alarm anyone who trusts the scientific method as a means to find answers and provide honest insight into something as imperative as a pandemic.
That’s a platitude, not an argument. And being absolutist is being sadly ignorant of the realities of public speech.
Censorship is not just sometimes good, it’s also sometimes required by law. There is a fairly long list of things that are explicitly illegal to say and are exceptions to US freedom of speech laws, including: libel, slander, obscenity, pornography, sedition, incitement, fighting words, classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, state secrets, non-disclosure agreements, personal private information, and, last but not least: lies.
Censorship is required by the GDPR, for example, when dealing with Personally Identifying Information (PII). Because the freedoms to speak publicly can conflict with our own freedoms privately, some kinds of censorship are beneficial to people including you.
Commercial speech is specifically exempted from US Freedom of Speech laws. You can spend time getting upset over legal private censorship all you want, but it isn’t a Freedom of Speech issue, and it doesn’t amount to a meaningful moral or principled stand. Our courts have already established through two hundred years or argument and precedent that our principles are that cash corrupts speech and should not be a protected category.
Today I feel free speech is worse off in the US than it is over here, purely for cultural reasons.
Also: I thought the limits on the US idea of free speech was that things like yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre would not be covered by free speech. But hasn't the internet created another kind of crowded theatre in which people can yell the online equivalent of "Fire!" to deal substantial damage to society?
I think censorship is a slippery slope and I am not at all for it — yet I wonder if what we see here is just the beginning of society figuring out how to deal with free speech in the web. Finding the borders of what can reasonably be allowed, because "everything" proofed to be an unacceptably destructive answer to most.
This is a very good point. Many extremists (left and right) are shouting "fascism!" or "communism!" and moving masses of people. The analogy works quite well.
It's not a very well thought of equivalence when the individual can't even yell "I think there might be a fire" without being censored, because platforms think (and most of the time they're right) that consumers are too stupid.
I don't understand what you mean.
> when the individual can't even yell "I think there might be a fire" without being censored
Um, don't you think they should get banned when there isn't a fire?
Right wingers encourage and carry out violence against people, based on traits like race, otherness, etc. Left wingers mostly focus on property, fascists ("Antifa") and sometimes the police. Both kinds of violence are wrong to various degrees, but I can kinda understand that someone who formulates a threat of vandalism against corporate symbols will get banned less likely than someone who formulates violent threats against minorities or specific persons.
These two things are not the same, it is the difference between someone keying your mercedes and someone assaulting you in the street. One thing is shitty, but survivable, the other isn't.
This characterisation is not based on my feelings or the claims of either side, but backed by publications like the annual report on the protection of the constitution as it is made by the German Verfassungsschutz – an organization which can hardly be described as left leaning: https://www.verfassungsschutz.de/SharedDocs/publikationen/DE... I only found the summary in english, the full (German) version has more fine grained statistics which support my characterisation.
Scientific discussion, as faulty as it is, happened just fine behind the scenes. But people who have limited views of how things work think the smart-pants showing up on JRE is the real deal when most serious people know it's mostly hot air. (And of course compounded by multiple frustrations - which is totally understandable)
Otherwise, I can't see a solution to avoid "nazi-like" ideas spreading while also avoiding some level of central, authoritarian censorship.
In fact when it comes to sexuality and nudity europe feels a ton more free than the US when it comes to speech. We don't think a depiction of a female nipple that kids used to suck as kids will corrupt society for some weird religous reason for example. The US is incredibly prude and in that area censorship is rampant, yet nearly nobody complains here.
There is always soft censorship going on in any society — it is just not visible to those inside it if the big majority agrees. You don't need a central, authoritarian censorship for this you need people that have a common shared minimum standard of what they think is acceptable. Or aa you called it: enough "mental defenses"
But when you say "vibrant right wing" and they're "just...not allowed to display Nazi insignia", are you referring to the extreme right wing that're basically Nazis without the logos?
If so, given that they exist, what do you see as the point at all of having those bans on the iconography? It seems your society largely _does_ have the mental defenses that I agree with OP are necessary to combat the downsides of free speech writ large. So then why have those bans in place at all?
Yet many of the German Nazis still have those at home, they can be shown in educational contexts or in museums etc. Forbidding something doesn't make it go away, it just shows where the free democratic society you live in draws the border.
Germany has been a democracy before the Nazis took over in the 20s and it is one again today. However many Germans are well aware that this could change again in the future. You might have heard about the paradoxon of intolerance: if you are tolerant to fascists, because tolerance is your highest value, one day they might come to power and create an intolerant society — therefor if maintaining a tolerant society is our goal we paradoxically have to show intolerance to those who want to abolish it.
This means Germans weigh the value of our democracy surviving fascist uprising higher than even freedom of speech.
Fully agree.
I think we miss over and over this element in the “free speech debate”. We tend to consider “free speech” merely as “allowing an individual to express him/herself” and I think is more complex than that. From my perspective, “freedom of speech” should be a stack formed always by three elements:
1. Freedom of speech itself
2. Intellectual humbleness from the speaker.
3. Critical thinking from the listeners.
Without those elements, I think we will not progress on the big scale on this matter and will fall over and over again in the same “back and forth” empty fight of “should/shouldn’t we allow this guy to podcast those things?”.
smart people are equally susceptible to propaganda and mind control as dumb people. But smart people think they are immune through "critical thinking".
FB has teams of social scientists with all the data in the world to run experiments on us. We are herd animals who think we are all rugged individualists.
It's not strictly 'people' yelling fire to cause damage to society. It is nationstates, same as always, contriving TO damage competing nationstates in ingenious ways. Points for the ingenuity but these are still warlike acts. None of this happens in a vacuum, and so much of it would dry up and become irrelevant if not fed and directed from elsewhere.
Not to mention you don't know the contract. The only public knowledge about the contract comes from Rogans description orbit, which contradicts what you're saying.
Is Joe Rogan really the problem? If you don't like it, don't listen to it. I don't.
Someone else framed this in terms of centralized vs decentralized distribution, which brings up a lot of important considerations — if Neil Young or Joni Mitchell would just distribute their songs themselves, they wouldn't have to issue an ultimatum. Likewise, if Rogan did so he wouldn't be the target of censorship.
But why isn't Young making that his hill? He doesn't care about freedom of speech, he just wants his ascendant. And Spotify could do what used to seem to me to be common sense, support its artists and drop those calling for restrictions on other artists' works.
This is a bad cultural route we're headed down. It doesn't go anywhere well. "Cancel culture" became a sort of buzzy topic of conversation, but it's a real problem and goes deeper than the referent of that catchphrase.
I also get cancelled on several forums on a regular basis when I say bad things about pharmaceutical companies or against government etc. even if it's completely neutral. I've seen all reasons already to censor me: - insults - conspiracy - talking about controversial topics in general
none of those were true, ever..
Also “cancel culture” is mostly not a bad thing, it’s more like “consequence culture”. The people who find themselves “cancelled” almost always still end up with large platforms.
But ultimately individuals can't and shouldn't be prevented from doing anything they want within the bounds of law.
> The people who find themselves “cancelled” almost always still end up with large platforms.
Survivorship bias. Most of the people who get cancelled just disappear. They don't have FU money or a big following. We only keep hearing about the few who are too big to cancel.
Plus you're not taking into account how much of a chilling effect all of this has. Many people are now self censoring. That has a regressive effect on society. We can't progress without free and open exchange of ideas.
I don’t buy the idea that the supposed “chilling effect” is a bad thing. If “self censoring” means there are fewer people spreadinf misinformation, then I’m all for it.
Are you suggesting that I, as a consumer, am in the wrong for choosing which companies I do business with?
The First Amendment states "Congress shall make no law ..."; it says only what the *gov't* can and cannot do
See https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/psaki-big-tech-should-c...
It's even in the article you posted, biased that it may be.
The government is not saying you can't publish misinformation, but that a responsible actor should acknowledge when it's publishing it.
Or maybe we petition those hosting Spotify servers & ISPs to ban the pages.
Actually, should spotify be resolvable by any DNS server hosted by a company?
Huh, or maybe there is a line to draw in the sand that isn't so strict? Nah /s
Neither is a settled question, though the world community tends to be leaning towards "yes" as the answer to the first and is busying itself with the mucky process of answering the second.
https://www.article19.org/data/files/Internet_Statement_Adop...
... And that's considering only the UN member nations. 70+ nations are not UN members and a statement like this has no bearing on them.
That's miles away from thinking paying people to proliferate lies about how vaccines work is cool.
You seem like you just wanted to condescend some Americans - a very tired trope on this site.
Or to put it more simply: would you consider parents who tell their children not to curse or risk punishment censorship? Or how about at school? How about requiring a dress code at a restaurant or school? Is this all censorship?
We have to be clear. Corporations editorializing has always been called editorializing, even when they do so at the government's behest, which has happened historically when the government feels publishing something could threaten national security or might create a panic. Or when a journalist is trying to curry favor with a politician. It's only censorship when a government authority figure threatens punishment.
It's not an argument about free speech. The first amendment and free speech are different things.
[0]: https://www.outkick.com/u-s-surgeon-general-calls-for-big-te...
Spotify's arbitrary choices about what content they want to host comes into it, what content they think is good for their business, etc. I don't think Spotify's choice to pay Rogan $100 million but not me is any more or less "censorship" than their choice of what episodes they want to include for that $100 million.
Does freedom require my boss to let me do whatever I want at work too? Or just Rogan?
None of that seems as clear to me as it does to you.
In this case, sure Rogan is just an idiot, but he’s honestly allowed to be. Spotifys competition, with Google and other only caused problems because Spotify was dumb enough to pay Joe Rogan $100 million for an exclusive podcast. By doing so they went from just being a platform to having an editiorial responsibility.
Had Spotify not paid Joe Rogan, they could have defended their position as “just a platform provider” who shouldn’t interfer with content.
In fact, I can deal with bunch more free speech violations if I getting enough money that I and my children and my grandchildren will never know need and never have to work days in their lives.
Attempts are curtailing the spread of dangerous misinformation wouldn't happen without the dangerous misinformation first.
Rather than being mad for "people calling for censorship", maybe you should be mad for people making a profit of deaths, or the general anti-science, anti-education culture that consumes and amplifies it.
It's not only about whether the falsehoods (say, National Enquirer type stuff, nonsense that hooks gullible people) are sexy in that they latch onto people's assumptions and fears. It's also about who's paying to keep pumping them out. None of this is organic. A lot of money goes into subsidizing this stuff. Follow the money and you end up with rival countries who actively want to see their enemies harmed, and have arrived at this very effective way of sowing chaos and sabotage.
People don't have to be that dumb, if you can flood their zone with crafted information to sway 'em. You just have to hook them and then lead them. You don't have to rely on people being incredibly, organically obtuse if you can play 'em and manipulate them, and that's where social media turned into a superweapon. It was for sale, and not very concerned about who was buying it, or why they were doing it. And here we are.
There is a reason people try to lump in any criticism with absolute insanity like the pizzagate conspiracies. They need the contrast to be as big as they can make it, so their story appears better than it is. Because on its own it really isn’t quite good enough.
The fact that this discourse can happen in the open is proof that free speech exists and is in force.
If the Biden administration could control speech they could ban anyone suggesting anything other than the official position of the government. Clearly this is not happening.
Likewise, if the government could control speech they could choose to force Neil Young to place his music back on Spotify for the sake of trade. This is not happening.
What freedoms can possible be referred to other than the First Amendment? This is the standard language of someone applying the First Amendment to private citizens and companies.
If you want to devolve into purely hypotheticals you’re going to find yourself on weak legs because the ultimate argument ends up being that “Joe Rogan speech is denying my freedom from hearing arguments I do not agree with.” These specific issues have been long settled by the rule of law. Being contrarian about this is neither productive or practical.
Where does my freedom end and yours begin? If I am infringing on what you feel is your freedom, where is that line? Do I get to play my loud music at 2AM when you have an early morning? Is it ok if you are sleeping in the next day so it doesn’t really matter that I’m keeping you up? When do these ultimate and unlimited unenumerated freedoms fall apart?
When they infringe on what society considers to be the normative freedoms we all get to enjoy.
Spotify gets to run their private business as they see fit because that is their freedom to do as long as they do not break a law or infringe upon your freedoms. Your perceived freedoms cannot infringe upon their freedoms.
So, no one is coming for your speech because you (being everyone here) don't matter enough.
Prior to the last few years, Propaganda has always been acknowledged as detrimental to society, and a weapon yielded by authoritarian anti-democratic regimes and forces such as Nazism, Fascism, Communism and others.
It's nature is to deceive, misled, and discredit the truth, in order to gain political power.
It's seen as many as a way to repress speech, by shouting louder and more clearly then the voices of truth. It silences other messages by publishing large content to the contrary as well as direct attacks on the truth to discredit it.
From that angle, it seems to me Propaganda itself is a weapon against free speech.
In my opinion that means when you have a lot of propaganda in your media and social spheres, you automatically have less free speech.
Now I reckon that just having someone censor what they think is propaganda is giving that person, if they were the one behind the propaganda in the first place, all the cards, as they can now promote Propaganda and silence voices against it.
And that's not what I'm saying the solution should be, but for me to be satisfied, I need a solution that recognizes both these dimensions. And the solution of just allow all form of propaganda I also see as terrible, it's the second worst one after the other, just let people spread confusion and attacks to the truth in masse is almost as bad as letting them silence the truth.
We need something better then that too.
I agree, but I just can't think what that would be. If you restrict propaganda; then you need to define propaganda. By doing that; you are perpetuating your or someone else's bias which would then be amplified by restricting everyone else from hearing of alternative ideas.
To be fair, you covered that; but I don't see how restricting speech does anything else.