Why Can’t Spotify Edit Joe Rogan?

Seriously. It’s shouldn’t be this difficult.

Photo by Harry Cunningham on Unsplash

I have another piece I’ve been working on that’s about Substack and disinfo, and this feels like a bit of a digression, but I honestly don’t understand why Spotify is publicly twisting itself in knots over what to do about Joe Rogan’s habit of spreading covid disinformation (via allowing guests to). There’s a simple solution to this problem, and it’s not the two extreme options that are repeatedly presented by the left and right, which are getting rid of Rogan altogether or allowing him to continue to say whatever he wants, regardless of whether it’s false and dangerous.

I’ll stipulate first that because Spotify is paying Rogan to air his show on their platform exclusively, they are acting as a publisher. This isn’t the case for everything they distribute. If they’re simply allowing a podcast to utilize the platform for distribution, they’re more akin to a social platform. But in Rogan’s case specifically, they can’t argue that they’re not invested in the specific content he’s producing, because they literally are.

I write opinion for a variety of major outlets — most recently, MSNBC, The New York Times and The Washington Post. Here is what I am technically allowed to do in those venues: be unintentionally wrongheaded about things, voice provocative opinions…