Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:
A popular internet personality, loved by millions for his irreverent, anti-establishment commentary, has been the subject of a heated reaction after critics accuse him of spreading dangerous misinformation.
The controversy engulfs the creator’s largest platform, which has rules banning dangerous misinformation and is now under pressure to enforce it against one of its most senior users.
Hoping to weather the storm, the platform’s chief executive publishes a blog post on the importance of free speech, refusing to punish the rule-breaker but promising to introduce new features that will promote higher quality information.
However, the resistance is growing stronger. Civil rights groups organize a boycott. Advertisers pull their campaigns. A hashtag trends. The platform employees threaten to run away. Days later, the chief executive is forced to choose between excluding a popular creator – and facing the wrath of his fans – or being seen as a hypocrite and a driver of dangerous behavior.
If this scenario sounds familiar, it’s because a version of it has popped up on every major internet media platform for the past half decade. Facebook and Alex Jones, Twitter and Donald Trump, YouTube and PewDiePie, Netflix and Dave Chappelle: Every major platform has gotten stuck between this particular rock and a hard spot at some point.
Now it’s Spotify’s turn. The audio giant has faced calls for action against mega-popular podcast host Joe Rogan for weeks after Mr Rogan was accused of promoting misinformation about Covid-19 about his show, including hosting a guy who was banned by Twitter for spreading false information about Covid-19 vaccines. This month, a group of hundreds of medical experts urged Spotify to address misinformation about Covid-19, saying Mr Rogan had a “concerned history” of promoting falsehoods about the virus.
So far, the kickback cycle reaches most of the usual notes. Critics have compared snippets of Mr Rogan’s interviews to Spotify’s enacted rules banning material “promoting dangerous false or dangerously misleading content about Covid-19.” Two folk rock legends, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, led the boycott, removing their catalogs from Spotify last week in protest at the platform’s decision to support Mr Rogan. Brené Brown, another popular presenter, soon followed suit, saying she would not be releasing any new episodes of her Spotify-exclusive podcast “until further notice.”
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek published the required blog post on Sunday, defending the company’s commitment to free speech, saying that “it’s important to me that we don’t take on the content censor position.” And while Spotify declined to take action against Mr Rogan, it promised to put advisory warnings on podcast episodes about Covid-19 and direct listeners to a hub full of authoritative health information.
Despite the superficial similarities, Mr. Rogan in a few key ways from most other clashes between creators and tech platforms.
First off, Spotify isn’t just one of the many apps that make Mr. Spreading Rogan. The streaming service paid more than $100 million in 2020 for exclusive rights to “The Joe Rogan Experience,” making it the headliner for its growing podcast division. Critics say that deal, along with Spotify’s aggressive way of selling Mr. Rogan has promoted in his app, gives the company more responsibility for its show than others it carries.
Another difference is who has the power in this conflict. YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook are ad-supported companies; if advertisers disagree with moderation decisions, they can threaten financial loss by withdrawing their campaigns. (Whether these boycotts actually accomplish anything is another question.)
Spotify, on the other hand, makes most of its money from subscriptions, so it’s unlikely to suffer financially from Mr. Rogan, unless there’s a wave of account cancellations. And given how few Netflix subscribers seem to have canceled their subscriptions during last year’s cleanup with Mr. Chappelle, Spotify can breathe easy in this area for the time being.
But Spotify has another constituency to worry about: stars. A leading music streaming service like Spotify should have popular hits in its library, meaning musicians with enough firepower could in theory force change by simply threatening to remove their albums. (Like a viral tweet said last week, “Taylor Swift could end Joe Rogan with a single tweet on Spotify.”) In practice, it’s a bit more complicated than that, in part because record labels, not musicians, generally control streaming rights. But it’s still possible that if Mr. Young and Ms. Mitchell’s moves were to inspire more top musicians and/or labels to take their songs off Spotify, it could pose a real business risk to the company.
A third difference is Mr. Rogan himself. Unlike Mr. Jones and other agitators, he is primarily an interviewer, and most of the uproar has been in response to things his guests have said. That gives him a more plausible excuse for holding fringe views, although critics have pointed out that Mr Rogans own statements about Covid-19 were also full of questionable information.
So, how will Mr. Rogan’s recoil cycle end? It’s hard to say.
One possibility is it will end up like Mr. Jones and Mr. Trump, whose behavior was so outrageous (and who continued to flagrantly break the rule even after being called out) that Twitter and Facebook had no choice but to shut them down. permanently down.
Mr Rogan could double down on misinformation about Covid-19, challenge Spotify to de-platform him and portray himself as a ‘victim of the awake crowd’, censored for speaking too many inconvenient truths. He was able to wriggle out of his Spotify deal and head back to YouTube and the other platforms that carried his show. (He might even go to a right-wing social network like Gettr or Parler, but I suspect he’d rather have an audience.)
Or he could do what PewDiePie, the popular YouTube creator whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, did after he was accused of making anti-Semitic comments. After briefly becoming a hero to right-wing reactionaries, Mr. Kjellberg apologized for his behavior, cleaned up his channel and eventually worked his way back into the platform’s good graces.
Mr Rogan could quietly capitulate, protect his Spotify deal and pull out of the Covid-skeptical fringe in a way that doesn’t cost him his reputation as a contrarian adversary. (This outcome seemed the most likely on Sunday night, when Mr. Rogan posted a 10-minute Instagram video apologizing for his “out of control” show and promising to invite more mainstream pundits to discuss the pandemic.)
A third option is that the whole controversy could disappear, like last year’s imbroglio with Mr. Chappelle and Netflix, which started after the comedian was accused of making transphobic comments during a special and ended days later with no real consequences to anyone. But this outcome does not seem likely, as the boycotts have already started and appear to be having a snowball effect.
The relationship between media personalities and the networks that broadcast their work has always been fraught. But things have gotten messier in recent years as growth-hungry tech companies have started paying top stars directly for their content. These deals have made them look more like the radio and TV stations of yesteryear – choosing popular acts, paying handsomely for their work, taking more responsibility for their output – and less like the neutral platforms they once claimed to be.
The relationships between companies and their users are also changing. Users of these services have learned, by observing dozens of kickback cycles in recent years, that a sufficient amount of pressure can drive a technology company to do almost anything. They understand that the company’s rules are vague and improvised, and that what chief executives want most – regardless of what lofty principles they claim to have – is for people to stop yelling at them. They also know that if a company isn’t just taking action based on listeners’ complaints, there are other ways it can kick things up a notch.
Spotify may think the worst of the Rogan reaction is over. But from recent history, we know that what appears to be the end of a content moderation controversy is often just a warm-up.