I don't really understand why anyone who claims to be a proponent of a free market economy has an issue with a private corporation deciding what type of content they want to broadcast.
JR sold his catalog of intellectual property (podcast episodes) of his own free will and was paid very well for it: about $100M from what I can gather. What Spotify chooses to do with it is completely up to them, even if they bought it with the express intention of "burning" it all, i.e. never broadcasting it, that would still not be censorship. That would be nothing but exercising their intellectual property rights, that they paid for, just like buying the rights to a song that you hate to stop that specific recording from ever being played again is within your right, or even negotiating with the artist to never play it again.
He signed a "multi-year" exclusive deal (the details are fuzzy, for obvious reasons) which means he sold his trademark and time for money, which is how the market works.
Exactly what he sold (NDA, limitations on his speech in his free time etc.) we'll probably never know, but whoever calls this "censorship" needs a reality check. There exists plenty of proper censorship in the world if you look for it, and this isn't it.
> I don't really understand why anyone who claims to be a proponent of a free market economy has an issue with a private corporation deciding what type of content they want to broadcast.
I don't think this is some irreconcilable gotcha. I support the free market as a tool when it delivers on the benefits that it can provide. Those are increasing choice and decreasing costs through increased competition and commoditization. If problems show up I'm happy to have legislation introduced to tackle those, such as not allowing food with known toxins to be sold.
It's like any tool. I support cars when they're used to deliver on the benefits that they can provide; getting people from point A to point B, and giving them the freedom to move between arbitrary locations. When they're used to run pedestrians over then I don't support that usage, and I will support legislation that limits the use of the tool in that manner.
Likewise if the free market is used as a way to reduce the availability of content, I can be against that while still supporting it as a guiding concept.
> Likewise if the free market is used as a way to reduce the availability of content, I can be against that while still supporting it as a guiding concept.
Joe Rogan being on Spotify is entirely about limiting the availability of his podcast. They're paying him to not make his episodes available outside of Spotify.
For all the talk he gives, it was ultimately a matter of money for him. I respect JR for being genuinely curious about vast number of topics and asking right questions, but he of all people should have known that limiting access to his podcasts will hurt his reputation.
Not necessarily. He could have seen the writing on the wall with Google/YouTube and wanted a platform where he would not be censored ... and may have miscalculated.
I agree. He's said similar things before on his podcast, and I have little reason to not believe him.
People seem to forget that he had an ownership stake in the UFC, which sold for over 4 billion dollars. Also, an ownership stake in Onnit (cofounder), which sold for untold millions to Unilever. $100MM is a lot of money, but he was very, very wealthy before that deal. It's not like he was scraping by on Ramen noodles before Spotify came along.
I disagree. Anoyone that say any decision was only about one thing (in this case, money) doesn’t have a very nuanced view of the world.
It could be about fear (of being back at a place where he wanted food)
It could be about legacy (he wants to give the money to children, family, whatever)
It could be about money (I will have felt I’ve made it when I have a Yacht)…but he seems to be a smarter person than that.
It could be about not ever having to work doing anything he doesn’t want to ever again.
It could be about distributing is thoughts as far and wide as he can.
but just saying it was ‘ultimately a matter of money’ is a non-statement.
Why are you against people freely negotiating deals even if those deals result in reducing availability of content? Does the govt really need to be involved in this?
Consenting to an immoral deal doesn’t make it moral.
As for whether or not reducing the availability of information is immoral, that obviously depends on what the information in question is. I’m unfamiliar with Joe Rogan’s work so I have no opinion on this particular case.
Edit: Based on the replies I wasn’t sufficiently clear. I don’t believe the Rogan deal is immoral because I have no belief about it’s morality or lack thereof at all. If you insist on a moral judgment that I feel ill-informed to make, then I’ll speculate that the deal probably was moral.
How is it immoral? He was paid a significant sum for it. IP is all about limiting information in exchange for money (generally).
I'm all in favour of reducing copyright power/length, but outside of mandatory licensing there are very few circumstances where locking IP up would be outside the scope.
Even if it was an immoral deal (I'm not convinced), we're not talking about someone who was coerced into a deal due to predatory practices or an exploitative power imbalance.
Rogan wanted to give control over his catalog in exchange for heaping gobs of money. He didn't have to do this if he didn't want to (he was already independently wealthy), but he did want to, so he did it, and was not harmed in any way.
>...Likewise if the free market is used as a way to reduce the availability of content,
That's literally the whole premise of things like copyright and patents. You can't just run out and start distributing NFL streams, copies of movies, or Disney labeled memorabilia without the expressed permission of the people who own that content.
Which are arguably a government-imposed regulatory capture whose disfunction causes the market to be less free. So, it sounds like the two of you kind of agree?
> I support the free market as a tool when it delivers on the benefits that it can provide... If problems show up I'm happy to have legislation introduced to tackle those
Then that's not the "free market" that you support, just "markets."
That's a silly statement and likely purposely obtuse. Practically any reasonable person talking about a free market does not typically mean a market with precisely zero laws governing it.
Then it’s a good opportunity to either officially set the new definition of “free market”, or stop using it altogether. “When we say X we all really mean Y” actually works against us long-term because there are plenty of people who don’t know that and some of those are the ones making the laws.
Language is organic, words and phrases take their meaning based on a social consensus derived from how they're routinely used, not because some person or group bestows a meaning from on high. The whole “When we say X we all really mean Y” is how practically all language works. When I say, "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse", no one in their right mind actually thinks that I could or would eat an entire horse, instead, everyone will correctly take the phrase to mean that I am very hungry.
Agreed yes, and I regularly argue that by pointing people to the definition of 'literally'.
To clarify my argument, I mean for those reading this post to either push for that change in the dictionary (the usual way: by being more clear on their definition when sing it and encouraging others to use their definition and do the same), or to stop muddying the waters (and possibly use an updated term).
Similarly, free markets are markets that have sufficient safeguards to keep the market free, not markets that are free from legislation. From the oracle[0]:
In a free market, the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government or other authority, and from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities
From this simple snippet, we can conclude three things:
- government and other authorities are only limited to not interfere with supply and demand; enforcing product standards does not make a market non-free
- good anti-monopoly legislation is an example of the government working towards the free market, not against it
- Anything involving copyright and patents is by definition not a free market
I’d agree with all of that, though I’m squeamish on the very last one. I think copyrights are too long and there are pretty big problems in the patent system, but IP protection does have similar benefits to enforcing product standards.
Essentially IP protection is encouraging creation and innovation by preventing someone who didn’t do the work from simply stealing it and profiting without paying the creator. This is certainly over-simplified, but one way of viewing IP protections is that it’s trying to balance multiple freedoms, and that a free market with no regulation at all is not actually free for everyone. Having no protections on product standards is a loss of freedom for consumers. Having no protections on intellectual property is a loss of freedom for creators (and, the thinking goes, would be a net drain on the economy).
Here are some hastily googled arguments in favor of viewing IP protection as part of a free market:
> That would imply the existence of legal “black markets”.
Why’s that? I don’t follow. How does black markets being defined as illegal imply there are legal ones?
BTW, don’t take my word for it, just look it up.
“A black market, underground economy or shadow economy is a clandestine market or series of transactions that has some aspect of illegality or is characterized by some form of noncompliant behavior with an institutional set of rules. If the rule defines the set of goods and services whose production and distribution is prohibited by law, non-compliance with the rule constitutes a black market trade since the transaction itself is illegal.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_market
> Black markets are markets that break existing legislation, not markets that are free from legislation.
Your statement "black markets are not markets without legislation" logically implies such existence. I regard legislation as a governmental act and in my opinion you stretched its meaning to an informal agreement between market participants.
But, if you meant legislation as some kind of unwritten law, that breaks state laws, i would fully agree.
You misquoted me there. My “not” wasn’t defining the term it was doing the opposite, saying the definition is not what you claimed at the top. “Black market” is not a common term for markets without legislation, contrary to what you said. The term for markets without legislation, or for many people, with light or restricted legislation is “free market”, just like @aqme28 was talking about.
So are you saying that you’re against exclusive licenses, even in theory? Say Spotify had signed the same deal with Joe Rogan but not removed any episodes from their own service — still bad?
As a legal matter, no, though copyright terms should be shorter.
As a civil society matter, I think we should agree that making a secret album so that it ends up in the hands of a hedge fund criminal is uncool. It’s appropriate and even good for us to say that while that’s something allowed by the rules, we accord it no honor.
The tech didn’t exist at the time, but honestly wouldn’t it be better for the world if Wu-Tang had issued a single exclusive NFT of the album, and then made the actual music freely available?
I mean maybe not, maybe the songs actually suck, but I would certainly like to hear them.
Who are we to dictate how artists distribute their art? If an artist wants to make their art limited even though technology exists to easily distribute it, we cannot make the choice for the artist.
Often artists like to make a statement with their art, and how an artwork is received is often as much a part of the statement as the artwork it self (think Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain). Wu-Tang Clan wanted to make a statement with their art and they did, quite successfully to be honest.
Who are artists to dictate what we do with information that we posess. If someone wants to make additional copies which takes effectively zero effort, the artis cannot make the choice for us.
Often people incorporate art into their culture, and what the original artist intended with the artwork is only a small part of what it becomes. Society thrives by sharing art and has done so long before copyright existed, quite successfully to be honest.
I don’t think this was this simple. This might be true of folk artists (and it still is), but a lot of artists were sponsored either by the religious institution or by patronage. I personally favor state sponsored artists and I do think that our taxes should go into supporting artists way more then they currently do.
However as it stands our current economy does mandate that artists make a living for them self, and while we still live in a world of 40 hour per week minimum wage where most people have little energy and time to work on art/hobby in spare time, artists selling their art with artificial scarcity follows logically.
All that being said, this is not what we were talking about with the Wu-Tang Clan record. Their piece was a unique piece that works as a commentary on how the rest of musicians distribute their art. I look at this more like a fine art piece (or even performance art piece) then music. A lot of fine artists incorporate music with their art pieces and nobody expects them to distribute it digitally (though many do). This is kind of like the reverse of that.
Finally, by allowing our artists this freedom of distribution, we get nice things, including a diverse and healthy art world.
> However as it stands our current economy does mandate that artists make a living for them self
It does not mandate that they need to make their living from a particular business model. You already mentioned patronage as a method of funding for art - crowdfunding is one natural extension of that. Performance also does not rely on artifical scarcity. Demand for new art does not rely on artificial scarcity. There is also nothing saying that artists need to make their living from their art - and in fact this is not something most artists can do even with society being burdened with artificial scarcity.
> and while we still live in a world of 40 hour per week minimum wage where most people have little energy and time to work on art/hobby in spare time
I don't think the 40 hour work week is something that should be reinforced in any way at all. If society can have people working full-time on art then there is no real need to keep this outdated model where everyone needs to dedicate a majority of their waking time to survival.
> artists selling their art with artificial scarcity follows logically.
An economy built around articial scarcity reinforces a need for artificial scarcity? Maybe, but not an argument for anything.
> All that being said, this is not what we were talking about with the Wu-Tang Clan record. Their piece was a unique piece that works as a commentary on how the rest of musicians distribute their art. I look at this more like a fine art piece (or even performance art piece) then music. A lot of fine artists incorporate music with their art pieces and nobody expects them to distribute it digitally (though many do). This is kind of like the reverse of that.
I have nothing against an artist only distributing their work to a single person if they want to do that for whatever reason - but I don't think that society should then help them in any way in ensuring that that art stays with only that recipient once it leaves their hands.
> Finally, by allowing our artists this freedom of distribution, we get nice things, including a diverse and healthy art world.
Hahaha no. We get art that is optimized for profitability which tends to work against diversity while almost all transformative creative endeavours are prevented - except when copyright is ignored, as it is with most UGC, game mods mods, youtube videos etc. where it is mostly the platforms profiting off that art and not the artists.
I actually agree with you. Liberating people out of our current economic paradigm is probably the best thing we can do for the art world, as it frees people to work on their own stuff (including art) in their free time without any need for compensation.
if Wu-Tang had issued a single exclusive NFT of the album, and then made the actual music freely available?
I think that is probably not what Skreli wanted. The entire point seemed to be that no one else would get to hear the music. Otherwise, there's really not much difference between a single person owning the NFT or the gold master with the mp3 being freely distributed.
> Likewise if the free market is used as a way to reduce the availability of content, I can be against that while still supporting it as a guiding concept.
Are you against the concept of intellectual property as a whole?
In this case your argument has great supporting points as this is driven by blackstone&blackrock capital funds using their assets, music and stock, to do culture war to force Spotify to suppress viewpoints these fund managers find inconvenient for their agenda. That’s not free market.
These funds subscribe to and push a China style system in the USA, as evidenced by their leading role in pushing ESG. There is little good about this abuse of what’s mostly either pension fund money or fed stimulus money.
Blackstone through its Hipnosis subsidiary has spend tons of capital to buy up 50% of Neil Young and much of other music, books and audio book rights
Blackrock&blackstone are using pension and federal stimulus money to push censorship of people opposing their agenda. Not their own money. They are also pushing a new non-free-market system change, ESG, using other peoples or fed money.
Both the way they get they money they bully with and what they push is therefore anti free market.
Do you? A 'free market' where governments can and do supply unlimited amounts interest-free money to a hand full of investors and big companies is not a free market at all. Not to mentioned big business in our 'free market' is constantly lobbying for all kinds of government control and protectionism and vice versa.
In this system anything can be bought by those who control the money supply by inflating all assets, meaning you can't really own any property. So what we have is neither a free market nor capitalism.
I agree that Spotify has the legal right to stop distributing any content they find objectionable. Anyone arguing that Spotify’s action is a first amendment violation is simply wrong. A private entity, like Spotify, can decide what content to distribute at their own discretion. I don’t think many people are making this argument.
Instead, I think many of us are arguing that Spotify shouldn’t exercise that option just because of an outraged online mob. That includes those of us that aren’t particular fans of Rogan and wouldn’t be affected if we couldn’t consume his content anymore. Many of us are arguing that as a general principal; don’t give in to a short-lived and irrational angry mob.
I am arguing for Spotify and other content distributors to ignore angry mobs because I worry that eventually such a mob will come for something I do value. E.g., I listen to plenty of music that includes gratuitous levels of profanity. I imagine that such music greatly offends many people, chiefly culturally conservative prudes. Should such an online mob form and demand Spotify stop distributing some of my favorite music then I hope Spotify resists that mob.
Maybe one day I’ll even be a member of such a mob demanding that some platform stop distributing something that offends my sensibilities. While my emotions of hate and outrage may cloud my rational judgment, I hope the platform will have the courage to tell me and my compatriots to pound sand. If we don’t like the content, then we don’t have to consume it.
*Edited to fix a mistake as pointed out in a reply.
The difference in me (chiefly culturally conservative prude) and the liberal cancel culture is that I won’t try to silence someone’s choices based on my values. You may listen to whatever you want and I hope you get enjoyment out of it. I support your freedoms and a lot of good men have died to protect them.
The difference between you and the “cancel culture” is that you are a real person who exists, and “cancel culture” is an emergent phenomenon that happens on social media. People complaining about cancel culture is like people complaining about traffic jams. There’s no nefarious person in charge who’s trying to “cancel” things, it’s just lots and lots and lots of people and a tendency to overreact to stuff.
I think we all know what he means. He means the liberal equivalent to the "socially conservative prude". Which certainly does exist.
(Also this is only tangentially related but why is being prude a bad thing? I had a female friend in high school that would get insulted for being too prude. I don't think people really realize the way these concepts get applied in reality. People are allowed to be prude just as they're allowed to be libertines.)
>There’s no nefarious person in charge who’s trying to “cancel” things, it’s just lots and lots and lots of people and a tendency to overreact to stuff.
There isn't? Are there not people calling for someone to be fired/resign because of some action they did?
It’s not the same people every time. People tend to want to out-outrage one another sometimes and it sometimes it leads certain people to call for boycotting/etc, and then sometimes those movements pick up steam as people try to be “early” to a given outrage cycle.
Nobody’s calling the shots here… nobody went and decided “aim the twitter outrage cannon at Joe Rogan, he ran afoul of the Cancel Culture and must atone.” It’s just a phenomenon that happens due to the tendency of humans on social media to amplify outrage rather than ignore it.
Every "liberal media outlet" I've seen tends to just regurgitate opinions they see on Twitter, so I don't really understand what "pushed" means in your context. It seems more like they're amplifying existing outrage than anything.
Do you actually think channels like CNN get their left leaning bias from reading twitter, rather than their owners? And I suppose fox gets its bias from listening to Joe Rogan?
> Do you actually think channels like CNN get their left leaning bias from reading twitter, rather than their owners?
That's not my claim. I'm claiming that if you actually watch CNN, they tend to literally put a camera to a big computer monitor and show you a bunch of people's tweets. I'm not talking about bias/etc here, I'm talking about how they literally feature tweets as part of their news coverage.
Of the typical stories on CNN that one would qualify as "cancel culture", they typically go something like: "<Celebrity A> said a controversial thing on Twitter! Let's take a look at some of the reactions..." etc etc. Their coverage seems to be focused on "what do the people think of X", all the damned time. Yes, this makes CNN quite useless as a news organization.
This is hilarious. Social conservatives invented cancel culture and used their influence to control the media we watched until very recently. Does no one remember the Dixie Chicks being made irrelevant because they critiqued Bush? No what happened is that the population is no longer majority conservative and the tools employed by them are now under the control of social liberals and they (you) can’t stand it.
Nice try though pretending history starts at some arbitrary line you can then use to critique. Conservatives are just getting a taste of their own medicine.
Well, that's a pretty poor example to use to try to make your point. The Dixie Chicks (a country music group with a socially conservative leaning fanbase) went to a foreign country and decided to shit on their president for whatever the early 2000's equivalence of 'woke points' was. Europe was wildly anti-Bush at the time, so I'm sure it played well over there.
Their American fanbase (yanno, the MASSIVE group of people that enabled the Dixie Chicks' success... it sure didn't come from European audiences) turned on them because their values were obviously different and I guess Natalie Maines couldn't grasp that.
I don't have any evidence, but I'm leaning towards thinking that the people calling for Joe Rogan's cancellation aren't his main fanbase. That's the common thread with today's "social liberal" influence on media- people that are complete non-consumers of whatever winds up in the crosshairs just go to fucking war nowadays against whatever they've decided is offensive.
> Just so you know, we're on the good side with y'all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we're ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.
Not exactly “shitting” on him is it?
Anecdotally, I think joe Rogan has lost a TON of fans over the last few years. There is no better example of this than the joe rogan subreddit. It used to be a place for fans to gather, but now he regularly gets roasted and fairly criticized. And if you’ve actually watched the JRE over the last few years, his podcast has changed SIGNIFICANTLY (for the worse imo). There’s no better example of this than the clip from 2020 that was circulating this week, where he basically calls antivaxxers bozos.
He used to have a kooky, interesting perspective and I appreciated how he would approach topics with an open mind. Even if I didn’t agree with his guests, he’d ask decent questions and confront the egregious shit. He doesn’t do that anymore. His guests are just people that believe the same fringe, unsupported contrarian conspiracies.
It is a poor one, if the guys explanation is right. Joe Rogans fanbase is not turning on him. They understand that he will have guests that not everybody likes. I skip the episodes that I don't find interesting. The pressure is coming from the out side mob that has never listened a episode and going with the sound bites from multi hour episode.
American main stream news distribute fake new very often, but I don't see much uproar about that in the cancel culture circles.
Glenn Greenwald made a good video about. Breaking Points, Kyle Kulinski and Tim Pool has talked about this issue. CNN, MSNBC, etc. can say outright lies and nobody wants them to be cancelled. Instead they are being promoted on Youtube. Does "Horse dewormer" ring a bell or "Russia gate"? Both of them are lies period.
Writing off critics of Rogan as those who’ve never listened to him is dishonest and bad faith debating. I was a big Rogan fan prior to 2017 when his guest pool become predominantly right wing (as did his talking points.)
Cancel culture has been going on since humans lived in societies. It's strange to try to pin it on one political party, as if there was a time when humans didn't try to silence those they considered to spread dangerous ideas
I'm old enough to remember the Dixie Chicks being cancelled by conservertives for daring to question certain foreign policies concerning the middle east. Ofcourse, it wasn't called "Cancel Culture" then, it was good ol' fashioned patriotic boycott to get them off the airwaves.
The use of language in culture wars are fascinating, I really wish I studied deeply enough in the humanities to really grok it. To my laymen eyes, there are a lot of evolving shibboleths[1], and verbal (or mental) gymnastics to variably identify an activity subjectively based on where on the political spectrum the perpetrator (or poor victim). People are really insist the other side is completely unreasonable, and is to blame for engaging in the culture war.
1. e.g. cancel culture, BIPoC, woke-ism, gender pronouns, virtue-signaling, &tc
Joe Rogan is not being censored for his political beliefs. There are many conservative podcasts on Spotify. He is being censored for medical disinformation. If you've listened to JRE over the last 2 years, he regularly (a) disparages the research and conclusions of medical professionals and (b) presents his own anecdotal views as fact. It is not "I think COVID is X", it is "COVID is X". This is neither in the realm of opinion nor in the realm of politics. This is a debate on whose medical authority to trust.
I wish people would have the integrity to speak about the situation honestly.
Discussions with conservatives on issues like this inevitably result in every topic being badly grafted and transposed into a discussion on "left-wing culture". The issue-at-hand is rarely, if ever, the point. Reading conservative commentary on this issue, one would believe that he was banned from Spotify for stating that he believed that small government was preferable to big government. It's completely and utterly fucking disingenuous.
As others have pointed out, this isn't about COVID. That said, the notion that some topics cannot be discussed or cannot be discussed in a certain way is not only wrong, it is outrageous.
Yeah, the original post has no context, I assumed they were deleted due to pressure from Neil Young & co about COVID disinformation.
It appears that they were deleted instead due to his use of racial slurs. Which, I guess, is a "gotcha".
With your regards to your second point, I do not know what you are referencing. This goes back to my earlier point. Are you saying that it's outrageous that Spotify would remove podcasts containing racial slurs? Or have you pushed aside the topic-at-hand to discuss some social issue outside of this topic?
As mentioned none of the episodes were about covid for medical information. I major portion where conversations with other comedians that may have touched on culturally edgy topics. It's like they ran a transcript filter for words like Islam
Agree - 100%. There's guys who are payed money to yap all day --- a lot not totally but a lot --- of the talent they interview not Joe is what brings in the listeners --- and that's fine.
Now,
- venture into messing with kids
- screwing with public health
- racism
and ... what were you going to stand on? the serious respect you plowed being the "in guy" for the last 15 mins of fame talking BS? Nobody cares that much. I don't. You're in decline now or out. There's a built in and pre-understood fungibility to the whole business, which puts a smile on my face.
Whether it's Trump, the I-man, or Howard stern a lot of media people like them b/c the bring in viewers. And they are the first to toss them out when the line is crossed. I think Imus (I-man) of "Imus in the morning" learned that in a direct way. So let's not totally dismiss the platform behind the host even if Spotify is OK here.
Do you mean 'distributing' rather than 'disrupting'? [first line & paragraph].
I'm sure Spotify are under colossal pressure to delete historical perceived heretical 'content' on their platform in order to keep their paying customers calm during an unprecedented era of US anti free A1 speech and hysterical media driven witch hunts.
I also think their long term prospects, as societal fashions change and (I hope) reason prevails, will not be good as they will be associated with a very dark period in history. IBM survived this after WWII but it took a lot of PR and having the media on their side.
Agree that hopefully Spotify can resist calls to stop distributing content that other users find objectionable. As you point out, fashion will change and hopefully it does so in a way that shuns calls for censorship.
Similarly, Spotify can choose to censor speakers if they think people will come back to Spotify/won't leave Spotify as a result of that action. Spotify should definitely censor whatever they need to in the pursuit of maximum profits.
While I agree in principle with this line of thinking, I do worry that this will just lead to platform fragmentation. My thinking is that if Spotify (or any other platform) gives in to one online mob then that will only encourage more future mobs. I imagine that there are numerous podcasts and artists that some group finds objectionable. E.g., I imagine many cultural conservative prudes find music with a lot of profanity to offend their sensibilities. Should Spotify start removing artists if such a mob forms and demands such an action?
The end result is that a content distribution platform will have to curate a specific brand that targets specific consumers and only distributes conforming content. Whereas we currently have a half dozen or so music streaming services that all have roughly the same content, we’ll soon find content fragmented across 20 different platforms; each corresponding to a specific slice of consumer preferences. Many of us will have to subscribe to multiple services to get the content we seek and will not be able to mix content. E.g., many of my current playlists on Spotify would be split across several disjoint streaming platforms.
Instead, I think platforms should never be reactive in calls for dropping content. Instead they should have a general principle of broadly distributing all but the most extreme fringe content. They can regularly update their principles used in determining what content they distribute, but that should never be done as a quick reaction to some mob. Otherwise they’ll constantly be facing a series of outraged customers that want the platform to stop distributing some content that those outraged user’s don’t even consume. And I believe that will only result in platform fragmentation as distributors curate a brand around specific segments of consumers.
I agree with you, but you’re describing a limitation of the free market.
Historically the press has dealt with this problem by taking a “lowest common denominator” approach to morality. Extreme prudishness.
For example, the infamous Hayes Code was intended to help movie producers deal with the fact that almost every American city had (different!) laws on what a movie could show.
I think the "platform fragmentation" argument might hold more water if we weren't discussing a podcast for which Spotify already has exclusive distribution rights.
I hope you know contracts usually have more than one line, include other terms, and may not go to the end of time.
For example, if Spotify stops paying Joe Rogan, they are unlikely to remain exclusive. Another example is that they may not have rights to remove episodes, or refuse to air episodes without loosing exclusivity or paying a penalty.
My point is that we don't know what the other terms are of the contract are.
You’re misunderstanding me. The contract is an exclusive contract. That may not be the case in perpetuity, but either way that contract today creates the “platform fragmentation” OP is talking about about.
> Whereas we currently have a half dozen or so music streaming services that all have roughly the same content, we’ll soon find content fragmented across 20 different platforms; each corresponding to a specific slice of consumer preferences. Many of us will have to subscribe to multiple services to get the content we seek and will not be able to mix content. E.g., many of my current playlists on Spotify would be split across several disjoint streaming platforms.
Where else can you get Joe Rogan's podcast, today?
Nowhere. That's fragmentation. Spotify literally signed the contract explicitly for this reason. So it doesn't make sense to start worrying about different content being available on different platforms now that people are removing their music in protest, rather than two years ago when they made his podcast exclusive in the first place.
Thank you for bearing with me. I guess I misunderstood your initial response. I thought you were arguing that fragmentation couldn't happen because services like Spotify have exclusivity contracts, not that it already happened!
Sure things are fragmented today, but that doesn't mean it cant be much worse. Today, most of the big catalogs have a ton of overlap. Exclusivity isn't the norm. If artists and services start drawing up into political camps, this overlap could significantly decrease.
Of course they are free to do what they want. But if they do something unethical, like removing content for political reasons, I'm also free to criticize them and for example demand a refund if they lured me into a subscription by claiming I would be able to listen to Joe Rogan.
Also, you are making wild assumptions about the contract between Joe Rogan and Spotify. Maybe there's a clause in there that they will not only license his shows, but also make them available to their users? In that case, removing the episodes would be a breach of contract.
It sounds more like you’re angry that someone is refusing to publish on the platform they own something you personally politically associate with?
Which hey, I get. But they are refusing to publish it because they don’t want to be associated with it anymore, and they bought exclusive rights to it from producer, so…
And I don’t see Joe Rogan saying he is in a hurry to return the money Spotify gave him for this exclusive licensing deal either.
The only real way I can think to ‘solve’ that problem would be to make it illegal to do exclusive licensing deals for content.
Which I personally would be behind (it is also at the root of the whole streaming provider wars, among many many others), but has very far reaching consequences intellectual property wise.
What could be done, is to pass a law saying that exclusivity contracts are only enforceable when the content is actually being made available. I doubt there would be any real support for such a law by anyone who matters though.
True, though that could also happen with the right court case. A bunch of right to repair related stuff, ‘right of fair use’, etc. has been won that way.
Intellectual property law has always had an element of ‘society gives you these protections with the idea and understanding that it makes EVERYONE wealthier in the long run’. There is no NATURAL RIGHT (as in, something that will happen unless interfered with) to exclusive anything related to knowledge.
If anything, it requires extraordinary work and legal protections for it to be even a potential thing, and that is becoming more and more the case.
To get that protection from Society (without it just being a naked theft from everyone anyway), there should be some exchange or actual improvement for the rest of society.
Saying that at a minimum if you have exclusive rights to sell or distribute something, you must be selling or distributing it at a rate that allows normal people to access it (there is the tough part - how do you define that!) or you lose exclusivity and anyone can distribute copies for free - seems perfectly fair.
It also encourages archiving and retention of our history, which would be a good sell for overall society I imagine.
Some issues of course with this position (as I was thinking it through).
- this basically means no one has any IP right to stop information being distributed at all. So if someone say writes a book, then is later embarrassed by it, they couldn’t stop people from publishing it. They currently can.
- this means highly valuable IP (source code to your secret search engine backend?) is very difficult to control. It would also probably apply to things like manufacturing howtos, blueprints, etc.
- Even if you say ‘distributed’ means publicly viewed, this probably impacts distributed/licensed software in various ways, and some of these others. If someone is able to open it in a hex editor that is certainly going to count as ‘viewable’. If they can do that without signing an NDA (which would probably be impacted by this too?), or going through a gate and doing it at your secure facility, that probably counts as ‘public’ too.
- so then there is no way to stop someone else from distributing your now deprecated software? Potentially for a fee?
Agree that it's not unethical in any usual sense of the word. "Ill-advised" is how I think of these situations -- likely to produce unintended negative effects down the line.
It's unethical if you believe that people should be free in expressing their opinions. (Yes, I know that freedom of speech in the US constitution concerns the government and not companies, but I'm talking about freedom of speech as a general value. I find it unethical to suppress someone's ability to freely voice their opinions regardless of whether the government or a private entity does it.)
> It's unethical if you believe that people should be free in expressing their opinions.
No it's not, because free speech does not equal the right to be heard.
> I find it unethical to suppress someone's ability to freely voice their opinions
Can you really not come up with a single example of when you feel a group, entity, corporation, whatever has any right to remove a person from their platform or premise because of what they are saying? Really? This is "unethical", categorically?
This is a very common question, and understandably so. It can be surprisingly hard to defend a general principle on ethical grounds. Principles are justified by observed regularities. Good principles do not necessarily lead to correct actions in 100% of circumstances.
The principle of “don’t interfere with the free exchange of ideas” is one such example where it is particularly hard to see the justification. The consequences of speech suppression are usually subtle —- how do you quantify the impact of a conversation that didn't happen? And at the same time, the consequences of allowing hatespeech or misinformation are usually not subtle, but rather immediate and relatively obvious.
I think we’re actually lucky because the Joe Rohan example does contain examples of good justifications. For the past two years, Rogan was openly discussing politically inconvenient inconsistencies, contradictions, and in some cases retroactively apparent lies by the establishment. It is good to know when your leaders are incompetent, when they are lying, or even when they have made a mistake and never taken responsibility for it! It is good that these conversations happened and good that people know this information.
But even if we can see that this is good, it’s still one of those abstract good-for-society things that is hard to quantify and hard to weigh against the consequences of its counterfactual non-existence. It is thus almost impossible to balance against the harms of, for example, supporting vaccine skepticism. But that’s not an argument for suppression, merely an acknowledgement that this is hard to think about clearly.
But it is a fallacy to say: Joe Rogan’s vaccine skepticism is getting people killed, therefor he should be silenced. The reason is that living in the sort of society that would silence Joe Rogan also gets people killed. The deaths are just abstract deaths.
Put it this way: image we get into a war in five years because Rogan and all the other independent voices like him have been successfully soft-pressured into not talking about the downsides, while the mainstream propaganda mouthpieces have been selling the war hard. Thus, we create a concrete terrible outcome because we allowed a culture of speech suppression. Unfortunately, even if that does happen, it will not be obvious that speech suppression led to war, because, again, general principles tend to have more subtle but far-reaching consequences.
There are also well-known edge cases where speech suppression is probably obviously the right thing to do. I personally think that the genome for smallpox should never have been published, because try as I might, I can’t imagine a scenario where the harms of suppressing the specific knowledge outweighs the possible (even likely) consequence of its dispersement. You can have a principle while being cognizant that tradeoffs can be valid.
Again, though, the reason why free expression is weirdly difficult to defend, is that the harms of “bad” free expression are usually immediate and clear, while the harms of speech suppression are abstract and distant.
This is an amazing rationalization that doesn’t seem to answer the question of why private companies are being unethical if they exercise their freedom to choose what they publish. Nor have you established that choice in the private commercial publishing industry amounts to “silencing”. There is a reason that freedom of speech laws in the US do not apply to commercial speech.
> The deaths are just abstract deaths.
False. At least 5.7 million actual people have died from Covid. Probably many more. Your counter is abstract and somewhat straw man, while the pandemic is a fairly specific and real public health crisis that more or less all public health experts agree requires active management.
You’ve misunderstood and somehow taken me to be saying the inverse of what I actually wrote, so thoroughly that it is difficult to see how you could be making a good faith criticism, though it is always possible that I just wrote my post very poorly. What I said was that the deaths caused by speech suppression are abstract while the deaths caused by speech acts can be very clear and obvious. Because the harms of speech suppression are hard to see, it is harder to argue against speech suppression. In this case the speech acts related to vaccine denialism can be clearly argued to have resulted in deaths, while it is harder to argue for the danger of deaths and other harms caused indirectly by speech suppression.
Though now that I think on it, there was suppression of anti-Iraq-war speech in the early 2000s. Maybe if those perspectives had been more widely heard, that war wouldn’t have happened.
In any case, what you do in your last paragraph is merely an example of the thing I’m talking about. Misunderstanding someone’s argument and calling that misunderstanding a strawman is itself a strawman. 5.7 million deaths on one side of the ledger, okay. Well, the establishment was wrong about masking early in the pandemic, so how many more lives would have been lost if pro-masking voices had been suppressed then?
If I misunderstood, can you elaborate on “it is a fallacy to say: Joe Rogan’s vaccine skepticism is getting people killed, therefore he should be silenced. The reason is that living in the sort of society that would silence Joe Rogan also gets people killed.“?
You seemed to defend and frame Rogan’s speech as if it was part of a beneficial citizenry probing corrupt government officials, and it seems like you downplayed the potential harm of spreading vaccine misinformation as being balanced out by the abstract harm of censorship.
I think that discussing both sides of a cost-benefit calculation will always sound like “downplaying” one side if you happen to think that one side of the calculation is obviously and straightforwardly the weightier. The way a utilitarian would approach this (not my preferred framing but not a bad one here) would be to say “how many deaths did vaccine misinformation cause, in expectation, probabilistically?” which is very hard to estimate, and then “how many deaths would result from the elimination of Enlightenment free speech norms qua norms?” which is even more impossible to even estimate. If we have a nuclear war because anti-war speech is suppressed (again: a thing that has happened historically) and three billion people die then “obviously” speech suppression was more harmful than vaccine misinformation. But this is the kind of thing that will only be obvious when it is too late.
To put it succinctly, you think I’m minimizing the harm of vaccine misinformation, and I suspect you’re minimizing the probable harms of normalizing speech suppression, and maybe we’re both somewhat right about the other.
This feels like a strawman, with an actual political example (going to war) treated the same as measurable scientific rationale. Joe Rogan knows fighting and stirring up his fans with provocative questions, he does not have any qualifications to contribute to peer review. There is nothing political about that.
When the smallpox genome was first published about 30 years ago we didn't have commercial laboratories that could synthesize a virus based on a sequence. So scientists probably didn't anticipate the current risks. At this point it's too late to censor.
Your subscription is churn. Every decision they make has net positive and negative effects in the numbers, but you saying ‘You promised my X but gave me Y’ is table stakes when dealing with subscription umbers as big as spotify has.
They probably did the calculus and determined they’d lose LESS people if they scrubbed the catalog than if they didn’t. It’s not a political statement to them.
You think a doctor saving the life of a white supremacist is the same as publishing content that promotes white supremacy? Huh, I guess that's certainly one way to understand the world
> You think a doctor saving the life of a white supremacist is the same as publishing content that promotes white supremacy?
I do not. That assertion is unrelated to the topic, so Im not sure why you imagined it.
To be clear, I have implied the consequences are equal or, worse, probably multiplicative...in the context of the theoretical consideration you posited.
> It's unethical to publish content that promotes white supremacists
Again, how does this relate to any ethics that applies to Spotify?
I’m the opposite. I paid for Spotify subscription long before Joe Rogan deal, and never listened to any of his podcasts. I learned that they’re controversial after Neil Young was pulled from Spotify. I guess the message was delivered, and I actually considered cancelling my family subscription and switching to something else. I’m happy about their decision, and will remain their customer.
Just so we are clear. You never heard to a single episode, but because woke idiots on twitter said something you considered canceling the service? Like, you were going to cancel because someone said Joe Rogan did something controversial?
Just so we’re clear, I don’t consider neither Neil Young nor hundreds of medical professionals to be idiots. I read the open letter too, and formed an opinion about what kind of podcast is Joe Rogan’s.
So at this point what matters is that Spotify made a deal with Joe Rogan, and thus Spotify is also responsible for whatever he fancies to broadcast.
As the only way to vote in this matter is my wallet, I considered cancelling the subscription. If I did I would also try to convince other people to do the same.
And frankly, Spotify was a better service without podcasts.
Just to be clear. You are ok with child rapist R Kelly and women beater Chris Brown being there, but some guy talking to a doctor/scientist is too much?
Fair enough. So what opinion did you formed on JRE? As someone who listen to bunch of his podcasts before I will be able to say is your opinion accurate.
Ugh... what's worse than the actual censorship are people like you that pretend to not understand the issue, at all.
First of all, WHO ARE YOU ARGUING WITH?!? - "proponent of a free market"? Who are you talking to? Critics of these reactions are not these people, so why on earth are you pretending you want to have a discussion when you deliberately choose to argue with people that have no objection to them? You're talking to an audience of three people, yet everybody that's on your side, the side of censorship will pretend you're refuting the opposing perspective. No, you just picked a tiny group that already agrees with you, pretend it doesn't, and then explain why they actually agree with you.
Ok, so it seems like you're fine with it, because Spotify is a "private corporation", aren't you? Is Spotify free to ban all black artists then? They are a private company after all. Or is that different for reason x / y / z. Fine, let's be a little more theoretical than. Youtube, Spotify and Twitter decide to ban ALL opinions that go against invading Venezuala. Is that something you will support? Private company banning an opinion which they disagree with, all fine and dandy, correct?
Top comment, most upvotes and everyone joins in on this farce... wtf is going on here?
First of all, your tone does not belong on HN. Secondly, you claim that I do not "understand the issue, at all", which is ironic to say the least since you then go on to make the following examples as presumably equal to what is going on with JR:
- Discriminating artists across the board based on ethnicity
- Social networks banning end-users for having an opinion
Neither of these are in any way similar to selling your intellectual property to a third party and them deciding whether or not to air it. If you additionally enter an NDA with this party, voluntarily and through compensation, that is in no way anything like discrimination based on ethnicity, or blanket censorship on social media.
Your agitation does not belong on HN either, yet here it is.
Why are you pretending this is a difficult issue to understand, it very clearly isn't. You're making up random assertions that fit your own predetermined perspective. Everybody that makes money on Youtube or Twitter or Spotify agreed to certain terms. And these terms say they can be deplatformed. So yes, the artist getting displaced based on ethnicity and the anti-war opinion getting banned is exactly the same thing. And it seems you think this is justifiable as long as a spread sheet says it's profitable to do so.
I'm not opening a discussion here, there is nothing to discuss. I'm simply following your own logic to it's conclusion. Your input is not necessary in any of this.
I think to rephrase the parent comment, the issue is that you're making an argument from hipocrisy. You're saying that free-market people should be ok with this but (it sounds like) you also don't subscribe to the free-market view, which means that what you said isn't enough to justify it according to your values.
Maybe it would be different if you said "as a supporter of the free market, I believe that Spotify was correct and in their rights to do this".
Seems pretty obvious OP is addressing a conservative audience that tends to be pro-free-market. For better or worse it is a VERY political topic and this argument attempts identify contradicting agendas of conservatives that take issue with this.
>I don't really understand why anyone who claims to be a proponent of a free market economy has an issue with a private corporation deciding what type of content they want to broadcast.
Perhaps they have other principles too, not just the free market as the be-all end-all.
Not to mention that this isn't the free market operating freely -- it's corporations being told what to do by pressure groups (as opposed to customers of those corporations voting with their wallets, e.g. by not listening to Rogan).
Are you so sure it’s not due to customers voting with their wallets forcing the change? It’s easier than ever to pick up and leave a streaming service.
I downloaded all my playlists from Spotify and will move to any other streaming service I want to (one which has Neil Young—whom I enjoy).
Who are these “pressure groups?” Are they individual musicians and customers? When do individuals morph into these straw men?
I doubt this has anything to do with "customers voting with their wallets".
I suspect it's due to investors realizing the fragility of Spotify's business model - thanks to some (high profile? ish?) artists abandoning them at the drop of the hat - and selling their stocks, resulting in a huge drop in market value. The company has already been steadily and significantly loosing value for the last year, so it probably didn't take much to convince a lot of investors to bail.
The White House responding over a week after Neil Young made his initial statement implies that they are following the sentiment rather than leading it does it not?
The White House said nothing about taking joe rogan podcasts down:
Q Sure. Last week, the Surgeon General also was asked on MSNBC about Joe Rogan’s vaccine comments on Spotify. And he said that tech companies have an “important role to play” in stopping misinformation because he — they are the “predominant places” where misinformation spreads.
Spotify is putting out advisory warnings on episodes that have to do with COVID-19. Does the White House and the administration think this is a satisfactory step? Or do you — do you think that companies like Spotify should go further than just, you know, putting a label on there to say, “Hey, go do your own — you know, check this out. You know, there’s more research you can look at — you know, scientific research regarding COVID”?
MS. PSAKI: Sure. Well, last July, I — you probably know, but the Surgeon General also took the unprecedented step to issue an advisory on the risk of misinformation and public health, which is a very significant step. And amid that, he talked about the role social media platforms have.
So our hope is that all major tech platforms — and all major news sources, for that matter — be responsible and be vigilant to ensure the American people have access to accurate information on something as significant as COVID-19. And that certainly includes Spotifly [sic].
So, this disclaimer — it’s a positive step. But we want every platform to continue doing more to call out misinform- — mis- and disinformation while also uplifting accurate information.
I mean, look at the facts, right? You are 16 times more likely to be hospitalized if you’re unvaccinated and 68 times more likely to die than someone who is boosted if you’re unvaccinated. That’s pretty significant.
"So, this disclaimer — it’s a positive step. But we want every platform to continue doing more to call out misinform- — mis- and disinformation while also uplifting accurate information."
That's not saying they should be taken down, she says "do more to call out misinformation".
>Are you so sure it’s not due to customers voting with their wallets forcing the change? It’s easier than ever to pick up and leave a streaming service.
I don't think people left Spotify because of Joe Rogan, not in any real numbers anyway (and we can see that next they publish their user statistics). It's a few pundits and musicians making a negative publicity fuss...
>Who are these “pressure groups?” Are they individual musicians and customers? When do individuals morph into these straw men?
You could have written: "I don't believe there are pressure groups involved, just individual musicians and customers". Instead, you opted to insinuate that I disingenuously created some "straw men" (and thus, am not to be trusted, or whatever). How about the principle of charity, and just making your case, instead on shitting on the person you're discussing with?
There were never just some individuals and musicians, but also major media calling for cancelling the show again and again, group petitions such as:
Apologies if you felt shitted on, but I do believe that you are inventing straw men pressure groups and ignoring the fact that there might be a legitimate organic movement. So I am, in fact, making my case.
> It's a few [...] musicians making a negative publicity fuss
One thing I'd like to add on this point is that this kind of negative publicity fuss, raised by musicians, can be incredibly powerful. If you aren't familiar with the work and impact of Neil Young, especially songs like "Southern Man" and "Alabama," I encourage you to consider his work.
His music likely opened some eyes in the 70s while the American South was still gripped in racist fervor (as someone who grew up in the south, I too was impacted by these songs when I encountered them in the early 2000s). Musicians have the power to influence public opinion. That public opinion is influenced by them does not imply that all influence is the result of a greater agenda.
"If you aren't familiar with the work and impact of Neil Young"
What I find hilarious is the number of folks of a, certain political persuasion (the fact a public health issue is politicized is absolutely nuts), have deemed Neil Young and Joni Mitchell as irrelevant dinosaurs from an artistic perspective. Some even going so far as to say their historical importance is of a mere footnote.
Of course the firestorm their actions caused in the public discourse on this issue has shown their voice matters quite a bit.
>Of course the firestorm their actions caused in the public discourse on this issue has shown their voice matters quite a bit.
Media pundits and organizations can always blow up and enlarge the issues raised by some artists that they agree with to further a cause they'd advocate for anyway.
Doesnt mean the artists are relevant in 2022 pop culture - or that if they had said something different (with no eager pundits to push it) they would been also listened to.
In fact, Neil Young for one, has been laughed at (by the same media) several times in past 1-2 decades, for his "out of touch" tirades against compressed musid, his bizarro Pono music player business, and so on.
>pressure groups and ignoring the fact that there might be a legitimate organic movement.
Pressure groups can be organic too.
They just aren't just "individuals" -- and their influence is not the same as consumer choice to listen or not to the podcast (and thus relegate it to unprofitable).
>When do their actions, in your eyes, cease to be ordinary "vote with your wallet" market interaction?
Doesn't the act organization itself change it from a "vote with your wallet" (as an independent customer) to propagandizing and promoting your ideas to others on what they should buy?
When it comes to companies working like that, people call it a "cartel".
Also, isn't there a difference between movement organized and advocated "don't buy Spotify" versus group dictated Spotify what to sell?
In the second case Spotify caved because of the pressure/threat, not because the product wasn't selling.
It might still be a market decision (in the sense of it being an economic consideration of Spotify's behalf, as the ultimate threat was to their image and ultimately bottom line) but it wasn't a free market decision as in consumers signalling worth of a product with their purchases or lack thereof.
What you're describing is how "vote with your wallet" works when the number of people voting exceeds 1.
Like, what exactly is it do you think they are coordinating, other than individually choosing to vote with their wallets for similar reasons?
>It might still be a market decision (in the sense of it being an economic consideration of Spotify's behalf, as the ultimate threat was to their image and ultimately bottom line) but it wasn't a free market decision
What you're describing, making business decisions based on weighing the economic costs of losing customers vs. the economic benefits of keeping the content, is indeed a free market decision. The fact that there are no options that make everybody happy doesn't negate that.
> and even White House statements addressing the JR issue.
Which I think you can argue is a problem (to the original question). Dragging company execs to testify in front of congress about misinformation and then framing any (in)action as monopolistic (during a time of anti-trust inquires) isn't exactly "free market" either. I'm not convinced that influence has fundamentally changed the outcome in the past year but it seems a bit naive to think the government has no influence in these moderation decisions. It's not hard to imagine an example where this would be less defensible; "WH strong disapproves of these 'powerful' tech companies amplifying content that contains misinformation about our justifications to invade Iraq".
As I pointed out elsewhere, the White House didn’t criticize anyone, they were asked about how they felt about the disclaimer that Spotify had added, and the White House said they were in favor of calling out misinformation and uplifting accurate information.
That’s pretty different than how you portrayed it.
> Not to mention that this isn't the free market operating freely -- it's corporations being told what to do by pressure groups (as opposed to customers of those corporations voting with their wallets, e.g. by not listening to Rogan).
Aren’t artists and content creators Spotify customers, too? They use Spotify’s platform to sell and distribute their content. We consider both the buyer and the seller to be customers of eBay. We consider both the app user and the app developer to be customers of Apple. Why do you not also consider the content creators customers “voting with their wallet” in this situation?
Pressure groups often represent customers. If a political pressure group can't dangle a boycott, they don't have much practical pressure to apply.
In this case, Spotify is staring down the barrel of a well-organized boycott from both customers and content providers who may (or may not) sign contracts to let Spotify use their music, podcasts, etc.
There were a few Argentine tango orchestras in 1930-40s that were tricked into signing a deal with record companies only, as it turned out, to prevent them from going to a competitor. As a result we don't have any records of these orchestras for the period of the contract, which may be like two years lacunas in their recorded history.
There is something deeply wrong with destroying things that haven't yet reached their natural end or not letting them grow, even if one is legally entitled to.
My wife and I have been taking Argentine Tango lessons for about a year now. It took me a long time to understand the mysticism around the "big 4" orchestras but I can say that now I understand and appreciate your comment.
Well, maybe the big difference here is that you have this example where you feel the participants were tricked. I'm inclined to believe you from what little I know of music history.
There is zero reason to believe Joe Rogan was in any way tricked or coerced. The situations are materially different.
I don't disagree with you, but legally purchasing the intellectual property rights to a work, and the proceeding to hide it from the public is still censorship in my book.
It might not be quite as wrong or bad as, say, state-sponsored blanket censorship, but I think we should call it what it is.
A work was available and now it's not. The only reason being that an entity decided that it should be removed from view. Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information[0].
Here, information has been suppressed, thus, censored.
I think this is nuanced. I can see your point if an artist is forced sell their art through an unfavorable marketplace. However in this case that probably doesn’t apply. Joe Rogan has a big enough of a platform on his own that he can probably get by just fine without selling the rights to his show at all. The fact that he did despite that makes this slightly less nuanced.
How do you call the opposite phenomenon in which a company is forced to continue engaging in money-losing activities because of interests external to the company (in this case, the interest in not making Joe Rogan episodes unavailable)?
I find it hard to believe this is a net gain to Spotify in the long run. It may well have been legal, but Rogan signed on as exclusive to Spotify with the understanding that they would be a platform for him and allow him to further extend his brand and reach his followers. Spotify is still in the early stages of their plan to curate and improve advertising in the podcast space, and their plan is to sign exclusives, forcing listeners onto their platform where the free tier can now have targeted ads as opposed to traditional podcasting with traditional media style ads.
Now anyone who receives an offer like this from Spotify will have to consider the possibility of having their brand censored. This will either drive up the cost to Spotify or simply make content providers refuse all together. So, unless Spotify has decided to quit this business plan, I don’t think this is a good long-term solution.
I do think what happened is Spotify saw its DAUs and subscribers dipping, and after the bloodbath in $FB stock last week, got freaked out and abandoned a long-term business plan to prevent a dip in users this quarter.
I don’t think anyone here is arguing they should be forced to keep these episodes up. I just think that they should voluntarily want to do so, and that it’s bad we have a cultural climate where letting people hear contrarian political views is a financial risk in the first place.
I’m not sure what you’d call that. But standing up to an angry mob is called “spine”— something Spotify seems to lack. The only JR podcast I listened to was the Bernie Sanders one; I have no dog in this fight. But I do dislike it when a bunch of angry folks silence someone. I saw it all the time as a kid when Newt and the evangelical right were in power. Today, the same abhorrent behavior is coming from the other side of the aisle. It’s all the same to me; moralizing do-gooders who can’t just leave other folks alone.
Uh, plainly you do. The commenter's main point was that what the broadcaster did was not censorship (and whoever calls it that "need a reality check"). You're saying it "still is in my book". What much more different can the two of you be on this issue?
Part of the reason for the disconnect here probably lies in the fact that the definition given in the WP is overly broad and vague. The way the term is usually used, it strongly suggests some outside party, typically an authoritative body like a government, intervening to say "you cannot publish this". Basically, there needs to be some element of outside coercion for the term "censorship", or even "self-censorship" to apply.
And no -- the weight of public opinion does not constitute "coercion" in this context.
That's why when a company wakes up and realizes "gee, it turns out publishing endless amounts inflammatory crap that does not contribute to discourse and with essentially no artistic value is actually not so good for our overall image and business model" -- that's not what the term "censorship" was is really meant for.
My disagreement is purely semantic in nature. I disagree that we can't or shouldn't use the word "censorship" to describe Spotify's actions. The other parts of the parent comment; free market, free will, all parties within their rights, etc, that I'm all fine with.
I just think we need to be able to say hey, this is censorship, and it's not necessarily wrong because of XYZ reasons and it's fine and above-board. Spotify's got the rights to the show and nobody can or should be able to compel them to broadcast something they don't want to.
However, pointing to a nebulous category of "proper censorship" (which sounds like pretty much exactly the same thing, just perpetrated by a state actor instead of a private corp) as a way to invalidate the use of the word "censorship" in this context seems dishonest. Not to mention that it strikes me as odd to refer to some instances of censorship as "proper" compared to others.
Let's go along with the "proper censorship" narrative and put on the tinfoil hat for a moment. It would be easy for a sufficiently motivated state actor to create or compel a private company to acquire the rights to works that they want censored, and then simply use the private entity as a front to carry out the censorship on the government's behalf.
I'm not implying that's happening here, but we need to recognize that mostly anything is possible.
If I'm entirely unable to access a work today that was freely available yesterday, it has been censored. The devil's in the details, but the semantics and results here are very clear.
Okay, and I would counter-argue: your analogy doesn't make sense, we are talking about intellectual works of speech and information, not physical goods.
I hate to say this is a strawman because claiming logical fallacy is overused in Internet discourse, but that's what your comment feels like. Along with some ageism sprinkled in as an afterthought.
Of course censorship is not applicable to a physical product. I have only referred to the censorship of "speech, public communication, or other information."
Sorry, I don't get where you are going with this at all.
"If your local 7-Eleven had Oui and Hustler on its racks last week, but they are gone this week, it has been censored."
I would argue: "No - 7-Eleven either decided just those titles weren't selling all at that well. On top of generating negative press, and driving away families with children."
When you say "free market" you imply that there is zero political risk (meaning risk of politicians using their elevated powers against you) resulting from their choices.
In reality there is political risk for highly public decisions. Politicians do have power. They can call you before Congress under oath without any evidence of legal wrongdoing by anyone. They can start costly antitrust investigations. They can start costly audits. Anywhere along the way, if you make the slightest misstep (or even if you don't), they accuse you of perjury or lying to a federal official or obstruction of justice. Or maybe they just don't "protect" you as well as they might from various unfortunate events.
Moreover, there's a pattern of governments harnessing the power of private companies to various purposes through this kind of coercion. If you are a CEO with a comfortable life do you really want to test the ideal that it can't happen in the U.S.?
> I don't really understand why anyone who claims to be a proponent of a free market economy has an issue with a private corporation deciding what type of content they want to broadcast.
I don't know if this is your opinion or not, but in general, this argument might hold more water if "activists" weren't gleefully trying to shut down relatively free-speech sites like Gab and Parler and others.
You can't have it both ways and claim that business can allow whatever content they want and then try and shut down businesses who do just that.
I support the right of the company to do what they want, but that doesn't prohibit me from disagreeing with how the exercise that right. I just think their decision to cancel Rogan is ethically and morally wrong, my issue is not with the legality of the move.
So, “canceling” means continuing to afford the canceled party a platform now? I thought you folks were concerned/concern trolling regarding tech deplatforming people wholesale, which is something Spotify has pointedly not done here. If HN flags a single comment I made, am I canceled? What do I do, join Gab for this indignity? Write a polemic about how my rights to use someone else’s platform to share thoughts they don’t want to condone is a grave affront to me, because I have a right to inflict myself on you and you must allow me to do so if you operate technology?
It’s really painful to see people draw moral and ethical lines over episodes of a guy bullshitting into a microphone being removed. It’d be nice if your ire and indignation were directed at an issue that would objectively improve the world, like exploitation of children, food inequality and starvation, the actual horrors of tech instead of the ones you’ve attached to, or anything but the plight a millionaire making yet more millions to talk out loud.
Not the OP, but a world in which IT giants do delete speech they don't like might be the same world in which the actual horrors such as starvation, violence or civil wars do not get enough attention because a discreet request from the implicated government is enough to take the incriminating content down.
Look, for example, at the way that the Indian government used to strong-arm Twitter into obedience.
"It’s really painful to see people draw moral and ethical lines over episodes of a guy bullshitting into a microphone being removed. It’d be nice if your ire and indignation were directed at an issue that would objectively improve the world, like exploitation of children, food inequality and starvation..."
The free expression of ideas is more important than what you listed here. And see if you can figure out why it is directly related to said issues.
Well, it's the left that pushing to cancel Rogan, no question. I am also certainly opposed to right wing censorship in any forms, but that's not really what is being discussed here. This just seems like whataboutism.
Much like your original comment, and it doesn’t change that you targeted a political side that you blatantly disagree with. Your statement would be better made without the needless political slant, which as I point out, the other side have done it far more egregiously and in public institutions, such as libraries and schools.
To call this ‘censorship’ I believe is wrong:
1. It’s scientifically proven to be false. Misinformation, be it intended or otherwise brings its own moral and ethical issues.
2. Private companies have the right to choose what they publish/sell on their platform. Preventing them from doing so is also a suppression of free speech.
3. Everyone has a right to an opinion, and to voice that opinion. No-one has an inalienable right to have that opinion published, agreed with or disseminated by any platform they choose.
If anyone has taken choice away, it’s Rogan. Rogan chose to sell exclusivity to his catalog for a very handsome some. Along with that, he chose to forgo certain rights - one being which podcasts Spotify choose to make available.
I think censorship is morally and ethically wrong. I'm center right, I voted for Biden, I don't have a "team". I find it mostly sad and amusing that you think insulting me for defending Rogan will get you anywhere... on a thread about Rogan. Christ almighty.
And yes, I'm feeling a bit baited that I even bothered responding to your throwaway troll bullshit.
Not necessarily disagreeing with your sentiment but...
One can dispute and critique their own "team". As a matter of fact the inability to self critique is what lead us to this current state of unnecessary tribalism.
If I consider myself "left" I should still be able to criticize the "left". The problem is the mob cancels anyone critical so we're now eating ourselves alive and pushing away anyone that does not toe the party line verbatim. That's a great way to send teammates to another team.
> If I consider myself "left" I should still be able to criticize the "left".
And...most people on the left do that. A lot.
> The problem is the mob cancels anyone critical
“Cancels” is just bullshit. Virtually every person that has supposedly been “cancelled” still has a prominent platform and large and devoted audience; what they've done is been criticized and lost some audience and goodwill because certain of their ideas have competed poorly in the marketplace of ideas.
> That's a great way to send teammates to another team.
Just because you consider yourself on someone else's “team” doesn't mean they see you that way, and just because you see yourself as, e.g., “left”, doesn't mean everyone else on the “left” is part of the same team.
Anarchists and Libertarian Socialists see themselves as on the “left”.
Lenin-/Stalin-/Maoists see themselves as on the “left”.
They aren’t, even approximately, the same team.
And neither is the same team as, say, Social Democrats or Democratic Socialists, also on the “left”, though sometimes people in those groups may have a temporary, transitory, tactical alignment of interests.
If I'm on a team it's team anti-censorship because I think it's morally and ethically wrong. You can feel free to believe me or not believe me, but by my observations it's really only the far left that is defending this censorship.
Alright so this is a tangent from the main conversation, and I want to keep it separate from the censorship talk.
I think by definition you can’t define/identify a side, and then place yourself in opposition to them and not be on a team? You may not have been on a team prior to the issue coming up or you might only be on the team temporarily for that issue, but it’s still two sides and you picked one, right?
Yeah, that's fair. Certainly in terms of debates about specific issues, picking a side amounts to "joining a team". What I was trying to refer to by "not being on a team" was more along the lines that I am not a Democratic or Republican ideologue or spin doctor, I will vote based on the issues rather than blind adherence to a specific party. I suppose a better phrasing would be that I am on a "side" of the debate but I am not on a specific "team" in terms of national party politics.
I believe the core issue here is: while the first amendment applies to government, it is something that businesses should try to make a core part of their ethos. The censorship that tech companies have been doing are really against free speech and freedom of association.
Yes, companies are within their legal right to do the censorship we are seeing. That doesn't mean it's right.
> I don't really understand why anyone who claims to be a proponent of a free market economy has an issue with a private corporation deciding what type of content they want to broadcast.
C'mon, you know these claimants only mean "I want a free market for me".
This is blatently obvious in America right now. A LOT of voices crying out against the 'cancel culture' are the first to line up when it comes to canceling something THEY don't like.
You're getting caught in the weeds and missing what's actually happening. It's not just about Spotify and Joe Rogan. If Spotify dropped Rogan and he goes elsewhere, people will still be trying to silence him. If Rogan is silenced, the mob isn't going to suddenly drop their pitchforks and go home. The corporate media isn't going to stop attacking independent media.
This is a larger cultural question and will determine where we go from here.
Are we still a society that values free expression and open debate?
You discount the damage trolls like Rogan et al did to the tolerance needed to make free speech a possibility.
We have these media trolls just spewing provocative nonsense, finding any open wound in our discourse and throw salt on it so they can have their lols, dollars, and influence. How can you be surprise when free speech is finding it's boundaries.
This is not even a partisan thing, I do believe exploitative media that feeds on strife is very good business and thus it finds its audience, whether it's left or right. Catering to the different psychologies and fears while maximizing profits.
This is exactly my concern for today's content and it puts us in a place where future content is at risk. Removing select episodes of sitcoms because they aren't politically correct means current shows self censor before creation. Removing back episodes of podcasts can cause a chilling effect on newer content and new creators. There is additional concern when the government is encouraging private companies to silence content. We need to decide if we want to live in a monoculture of thought pushed down from the political leaders or if we want to live in a diverse culture of thoughts and ideas pushed up from the individuals.
Not entirely correct, it is a licensing deal, with exclusivity to Spotify. JR is still the owner of the IP, however, it can only be distributed through Spotify.
But your point still stands, Spotify chooses what they will distribute, which is okay.
My only gripe, in this whole Spotify/Rogan saga, is with the mainstream media that sees Rogan as a threat to their business model so they try to slander him for miss-information, while being greater purveyors of miss-information themselves.
Let me go off on a slight tangent: Should all jokes be taken at face value? Communication is a complex business, and surely what's literal is largely irrelevant; what matters is what is communicated; i.e. what a recipient learns from whatever signals you transmit.
JR is deceptive not because every spoken word he says taken in isolation is false, but because the way he frames and presents various sources leads listeners to draw false conclusions. Taking everything he says at face value is no more valid that taking a joke at face value. TL;DR: - "just asking questions" is deceptive; that's not a valid way to learn nor inform. We could discuss in depth how it's deceptive, but that's not really the point - the point is that not all questions will be interpreted literally, so you need to do the same when judging how reasonable that communication is. You have to look holistically at the message listeners will hear.
> JR is deceptive not because everything he says taken in isolation is false
I understand at what you are getting at, words at face value don't mean much, context is everything. However, listening to JR I never get a feeling that I'm being intentionally deceived.
The falsehoods he believes seem to me to be a genuine lack of awareness on his parts, the fact that he changes opinions when confronted with the fact what he said was bullshit gives me trust that he is not out to deceive me.
If he's framing X doctor as best in the field because of Y achievements is because the average Joe would also believe that as well. And the fact that he has corrected some statements made by the past two controversial guests, regarding Covid, is the reason why I trust he's not deceiving with some agenda. Unlike with most mainstream media where I am always trying to figure out the underlying agenda of every statement made from the hosts.
I have no idea if JR is intentionally deceptive, or merely deluded. I think that kind of stuff is often something of a grey area anyhow; I mean part of being able to convince people of things is to be able to come up with a narrative that sounds convincing to yourself. It's perfectly plausible to me, at least, that he's convinced himself of things that aren't reasonable, that he may at one point have doubted, but now thinks are at least plausible because he's so embedded himself and his persona in the notion that alternative explanations must be reasonable. In any case, whether confused, delusional, honestly misinformed, intentionally exaggerating, intentionally misleading - or some combination thereof - he can still be deceiving his listeners.
As to an agenda: he has clear monetary and reputational motives for coming up with controversial guests and perspectives. People _like_ acquiring followers, and he's even being paid to do so. There's no need for anything as crude as an outright payment by some snake-oil salesperson to cause a conflict of interest, fame and fortune are quite he incentives by themselves - and here too, people can convince themselves they're onto something (and do so entirely honestly!) when they get this kind of positive feedback - even if it's nonsense.
If you believe that Joe's motives are any more pure than those of mainstream-media hosts, you're wearing rose-tinted glasses. Also, he is a mainstream media host. He's just a deceptive one, that's all. If anything, most mainstream media hosts have _fewer_ incentives to lie; after all, they tend not to simultaneously be media owners nor to rake in quite as much cash as he does, though surely there are exceptions. Also, the mere fact that other media tends to involve a much greater back-office makes it slightly harder to go off the deep end - your colleagues may sometimes say things to burst your (potentially honest) self-deceptive bubble.
It should be up to the listeners to judge the content of JR. Not someone with a blue pencil (or was it a red pencil). There is no possible justification in a free society to censor someone just because someone might be mislead by them. It is patronizing to think that we know better and so should decide for the rest what is available or not.
1. I'm curious: why do you believe every individual human should be forced to/be free to (same thing here!) judge each piece of content for themselves? Why is it morally right to let millions of people be deceived, when you know they'll be deceived?
2. On a rather related front: what do you think is the key differentiating factor that explains why humans (homo sapiens) have so devastatingly outstripped all ecological competitors?
My personal answer to question 2 explains why I have my doubts about all too rigidly accepting your moral thesis here. I mean, I accept and support the idea that honest debate can help surface tricky truths - and that in that context debate must be free, but not that all speech should be promoted unconditionally. That's harmful, and the only reason we're even talking about that is because as a society we've come to see the first amendment not merely as a tool to constrain an overly powerful, potentially abusive government, but as an axiom of patriotic identity. The first amendment is not perfect, and even if it were, it should not be applied blindly to every situation, nor should it replace all other social norms about honesty and truth.
Let me turn that onto yourself. Why do you believe that you are right? And why do you think you (or whoever) gets to decide what is correct or not for the remaining millions? No one is forcing anyone to anything (after all only who wants tunes in to JRE) although I think it is very healthy to have an enquiring mind and to have the habit of questioning and judging everything of importance you come by.
Hence my question 2. If you can answer that honestly, and in good faith, at least my personal answer to this follows, and hopefully, eventually, why Rogan's approach is fundamentally invalid; why just asking questions is deceptive.
But even if your perspective differs - I don't expect everyone to follow my lead, of couse - I don't think you're going to understand my reasoning without at least trying to understand and answer that question. In essence - your assertion that it's (implicitly unconditionally) "very healthy to have an enquiring mind" is backed by an assumption I do not share. I know that there are conditions here, and Rogan isn't satisfying those. And the heart of that disagreement is behind question 2.
So if we censor information and don't let people like Joe Rogan ask questions then the human species will be a better species instead of some kind of an ecological disaster?
Also, you don't think that having an enquiring mind is good? How do you justify that? And what is the assumption I made that you don't share?
Maybe Spotify, as the owner and publisher of the content that they paid a lot of money for, realise that THEY are misleading you and they aren’t comfortable with that / feel that you deserve better / would rather that you stay alive so that you continue to send them money [delete as appropriate]
When I signed up for Spotify I did sign up for their moral values but for the service they provide. It is up to them to do whatever they like with their platform and it is up to me to voice my opinion and vote with my feet when I am no longer happy with their service.
Could you please give us some specific examples of Joe Rogan being deceptive with direct quotes in context? I've only ever listened to a few episodes but I'm always suspicious of vague allegations with no evidence.
If you want professional fact-checking, he's high profile enough you can google it. E.g. this is recent: https://www.bbc.com/news/60199614 and includes some amusing quackery. However, the real problem here isn't just the outright claims he makes, it's that he platforms dangerous cook's like Malone and presents their debunked, non-scientific nonsense as reasonable.
Name a single MSM person or outlet and I'll give you ten stories that were objectively speaking misinformation that led to far more severe consequences than anything Joe Rogan has done. Which one do you want? The "Russian bounty" story? The "Ivermectin ODs keep shot people waiting outside" story? How about the "WMD" thing? Go ahead, let's see how Joe Rogan's latest monkey story compares to that.
TL;DR: People enjoy Joe Rogan because he's having simple conversations without pretending to have all the answers. Meanwhile the entire MSM, from Rachel Maddow to James Clapper has deliberately lied to their audience to push for wars and escalations. If you want to start cancelling, start there.
This applies to almost any media outlet in the world, even your comment here. For example here you framed JR as the only person doing framing to push his agenda.
Right, so for all media you need to consider their message holistically, not parse statements in some legalistic fashion that no real listener would interpret them in. And some messages survive that test, and others don't. Given the absurd covid nonsense JR has said himself and platformed (which is much more impactful), I don't trust his judgement. And of course, there are outlets that specialize in doing this kind of review, and while they tend to take things a little to literally IMNSHO, that only serves to _underrepresent_ how problematic outlets like Joe Rogan are, and he doesn't rank highly as it is.
TLDR: That a message has context is an inescapable fact of life; but using context to deceive isn't.
>I don't really understand why anyone who claims to be a proponent of a free market economy has an issue with a private corporation deciding what type of content they want to broadcast.
It's amazing how people don't get cognitive dissonance over this disingenuous song and dance. The people lauding the choice of private companies to operate as they please when they deplatform are the very people pressuring private companies to deplatform people they don't like in the first place. If you were genuinely in favor of private companies operating as they see fit, you wouldn't feel motivated to pressure them to drop content you don't like.
>What Spotify chooses to do with it is completely up to them
What we don't like is that is it not left "up to them" what to do with their content. The point of the free market is that individuals are left to act independently in their own interests. This ideal is undermined when groups create pressure to deplatform or pull content.
If records of what people did and said are conveniently deleted from history, no one can be held accountable for what they say and do. The ideal that companies can do whatever they want is far too short sighted. The modern world is so stuck on a rigid definition of freedoms that conveniently changes when it doesn't serve the perspective it is being "preached" from.
Platforms are contracted by their users, they are not simply homeowners with private property. Too many companies these days get away with code and content changes without proper accountability, and things are regularly hidden to cover tracks... It's making the Internet very toxic now, and the blanket statements don't apply any more, people should always be held accountable for what they do and say in the course of making money at all levels, that's the only real thing protecting us from becoming slaves to corporate interests.
Yeah, it’s their free will to censor the content that they deliver. It’s also the consumers free will to have a problem with it. I don’t think anyone here is advocating for a legislative solution to this dispute. Spotify is making a financial/business decision, and the consumers are concerned with the product they are paying for.
>I don't really understand why anyone who claims to be a proponent of a free market economy has an issue with a private corporation deciding what type of content they want to broadcast.
Not everyone who supports free markets is a market fundamentalist. It is not hard to understand that people may support free markets for most goods but oppose them for healthcare, education, senate seats and slaves. Do you really have a hard time understanding that?
>Exactly what he sold (NDA, limitations on his speech in his free time etc.) we'll probably never know, but whoever calls this "censorship" needs a reality check.
Censorship is the suppression of information. You may consider it good, you may consider it bad; it may be done by public institutions, it may be done by private institutions. NDAs are literally a form of censorship. I am not sure what you even mean by censorship if you think that isn't censorship.
Precisely. If one pays me $100 to not say "cucumber" today, thats not censorship. If one tells me not to say "heil hitler!" at their garden party, thats also not censorship. Surely there are other garden parties where such statements are welcome - Or I am free to throw my own.
Now, if I can't say "cucumber" at all, in any context, whether I entered in any agreement or not - thats censorship.
The right is maximalist on property rights except when it negatively impacts them. Then we need government regulation. If it were more left leaning ideas being deplatformed nobody on the right would care and instead the left would be up in arms about “cancel culture.”
Very very few people are consistent in their views about privacy, freedom, or property rights. Politics is mostly a football game and the refs are only right when they call it in favor of your team.
That is debatable. Many would argue that censorship "by definition" involves the government (not the case here), and not merely the removal of content by someone, but prohibition for everyone to distribute it (not the case here as far as I can tell).
It literally satisfies the definition of censorship of three dictionaries I checked. Government censorship is the most egregious type we should all fear, but it's not the only type.
If you're saying "political censorship" is the only form of censorship that matters - it's debatable in the same way flat earth arguments are debatable.
Follow up clarification: If your argument is "corporate censorship is benign when compared to political censorship" then I concede that is very debatable indeed.
> As a proponent of Net Neutrality, I recognize that there are instances where corporations should not have the last say in any matter.
Since when did the term net neutrality change from meaning "a free and open internet on equal terms" to "expropriating platforms that refuse to show things I want to see"?
> I don't really understand why anyone who claims to be a proponent of a free market economy has an issue with a private corporation deciding what type of content they want to broadcast.
People support the free market because they like freedom. People conspiring to deplatform legal content cuts against that freedom. And they see arguments like this one as rhetorical tricks to get them to disarm and be colonized.
This is just the GPL vs. BSD wars all over again, with people claiming that freedom only means BSD-style and not worrying about the freedom-preserving aspects of the GPL and that if you're pro-GPL you're anti-freedom.
It seems to have been a licensing deal, so control reverts to him at the end of the deal. It doesn't sound like he actually "sold" all rights, and he almost certainly only sold certain rights even during the deal. As you say, we'll probably never know all of the details.
I do agree with your underlying defense of private property. Spotify has a legal right to do this. There is no contractural issue here. And this is not censorship.
But there is a cultural question that I think this defense sidesteps a bit. I'd frame it as a question.
What level of heterodox opinion would you encourage Spotify (and the like) to tolerate? What opinion would be heterodox to you or your peers that you'd want to see Spotify to defend as the realm of reasonable on a platform of broad interest to the general public?
Not sure whether your question was rhetorical but here is a suggestion anyway:
Draw the line where people spread lies or harass others so that actual harm gets done in the real world. Alex Jones got deplatformed after some of his fans were threatening grieving Sand Hooks families. Joe Rogans episodes were removed after they spread misinformation that convinces people to not get vaccinated in the middle of a pandemic, which will probably cause some deaths given how many people listen to his content.
This sounds good at first, but I think it wears differently if you try to apply it to something in a different political quadrant.
Consider in the summer of 2020 there was a popular social movement that had quite a presence on social media that was spreading incorrect and ultimately very harmful statistics about police violence.
Arguably, this led to wide spread riots, large scale property destruction in multiple cities and ultimately an increase in crime. I think if a vocal minority bullied large corporations to effectively deplatform those social justice organizations then I think many people would be playing a different tune.
Lol. Why is the Dr.Mallone and Dr.Peter McCullough interview still there? Those are the controversial ones. They did not say not take the vaccines. Dr.Mallone said that he is vaccinated.
It can be both censorship and exercising intellectual property rights. Only buying something to burn it is obviously censorship. A legal monetary transaction can be a means to censorship
> I don't really understand why anyone who claims to be a proponent of a free market economy has an issue with a private corporation deciding what type of content they want to broadcast.
1. The private corporation “decided” it wanted to broadcast JRE
2. X happened
3. Private corporation decided it didn’t want to broadcast some JRE episodes
Your hypothesis is that the popular outcry against JR, and the associated potential monetary losses, was not actually the reason Spotify did this.
Rather, you believe the action was because the white house said generally that they could do more. Like, that vague statement which didn't even mention episode removal, forced Spotify to do this, not the money.
So if it's profitable for Youtube and Twitter to push for a war and ban all dissenting voices you wouldn't feel there's a need to discuss whether or not that's a good thing, you'd instead have an argument about whether or not private companies should be able to do that?
There are far more interesting issues at hand and if you pretend this is a discussion about the legalities of this behaviour instead of a question about where idiotic self-harming nonsense like this leads our society you're being deliberately obtuse.
> I don't really understand why anyone who claims to be a proponent of a free market economy has an issue with a private corporation deciding what type of content they want to broadcast.
You don't understand why someone would want to have all episodes of their favourite podcast available in one place? Just because someone supports the free market doesn't mean they don't have preferences. Support of the free market just means that one wants buyers and sellers to be able to transact without coercion, it doesn't imply any specific opinion about the practices of a company.
I don't like bad products and don't want companies to do stuff like this. I don't particularly care about Joe Rogan, but I've had a hell of a time finding episodes of various TV shows that have had episodes removed (Community, South Park, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) from services, and eventually I just end up pirating that episode.
I don't think what Spotify's doing should be illegal but that doesn't mean I have to like it or that I can't say they're making their product worse.
If you are referring to people who want Spotify to be forced to do things by law, like keep episodes up (which would be bizarre), then I'm against that too.
> You don't understand why someone would want to have all episodes of their favourite podcast available in one place?
I understand that perfectly well. I don't understand why Spotify would be obligated to serve that need, or indeed serve any content they own that they do not want to serve.
When you make a comment like this without even acknowledging the social dynamic at play, which is like the whole story, you come across as very disingenuous and very pro censorship.
This is not something Spotify woke up one day and decided to do of their own volition, with their own free market defined property. There was much more to it than that.
The White House(!) was calling for this type of censorship!
Do you think that might be relevant to the discussion?
I would turn your first sentence around on you. I can't understand how anyone who sees the garbage we're inundated with in all forms of media could be a proponent of an unfettered free market economy. We used to have laws to help ensure we have media we can trust. Then they repealed those laws and we got Fox News... and, incomprehensibly, it got steadily worse from there. The current situation is untenable.
But they aren’t deciding for themselves, they’re being coerced by a vocal minority of people who are threatening their entire existence and have already done significant damage to their corporate valuation and reputation precisely because they are not broadcasting exactly what this vocal minority demands. It’s not about freedom for businesses. It is the exact opposite!
Freedom of speech has never meant the right to force platforms to broadcast your message.
Nobody is violating JR’s free speech, Spotify is just acting within the framework of the agreement they made with JR.
Whether that involves only the podcast itself or limits on what he can say regarding their interactions, we don’t know because the deal is not public. But nobody forced JR to sign anything, including any potential NDAs.
Definitely intentional! Parent is making the point that freedom of speech should not require authorities compelling speech, even though some free speech advocates seem to be going in that direction.
Platforms are starting to form practical monopolies.
Google controls searching for content. If they don’t like the topic you will never be found. They routinely suppress anything on the right.
Hosting that can handle load and hackers for normal people is extremely difficult.
I think the real issue isn't that people are calling for censorship. They're calling for Spotify to not pay people to produce political propaganda.
Now, we get the worst of both worlds, where Spotify funds the production of harmful propaganda (by their own published standards), and also starts censoring independently produced content.
What specifically is the harmful political propaganda? Please provide direct quotes in context so that we can understand whether your complaint is valid.
You're not making any sense. The Spotify Platform Rules don't mention anything about "political propaganda" or "harmful propaganda", as per your original comment above. So what was your point exactly?
I don't think there is any conflict here, people aren't criticizing how the free market works, they're criticizing Spotify for what they see as caving. The "free market" allows companies to do whatever they want with their IP, and it also allows people who are unhappy with that company's actions to criticize them. There's nothing that's not "free market" about that.
If you are trying to make the distinction that "censorship" is a term with a specific definition that applies to government censorship, I don't think people really disagree with that either, they're just using the phrase loosely because nobody's provided a better concept to apply. Call it corpo-sensorship, or corpoship, or whatever, but until there's a better word people will just keep using the more digestible one in a lazy way.
I agree. I’m a free market, free speech guy, and I have no problem with companies doing whatever they want with their content. There are fortunately plenty of places to get podcasts, and there are plenty of podcasts. If you want to dig into any issue, you can do so on the free and open internet. May it ever be so.
I agree with everything you said, but I feel that you're missing the point here.
The issue is not _that_ the episodes were deleted.
The issue is that social pressure resulted in removal of information from (what is considered by most as) the "public realm". This information comes in the form of "open" (seeming) discussion with people who hold various views. This type of debate and discussion should be encouraged by our society.
This stands in stark contrast with the profit motivator that drives those who govern these "public realm"-ish services. This is not a matter of the free market being free, but more that our society is becoming greatly dependent on services that are intrinsically business driven. Those services being seen as the "open forum" that they are not needs to be fixed.
I don't like rogan, for all i care, he can burn in hell.
But : the negotiation would have run very very different if they would have said :we buy it, but will never use or publish it!
He might have still sold (for a higher price) or rejected the offer.
You can't change the "purpose" of a contract after it was made.
In german, we have a law, yes a law, basically saying : in treu und glauben (in good faith / in trust and believe) it basically prevents contractors to write contracts which fuck over signers.
It is super rarely used for misuse of contract law / information of the signer, but sometimes it is. This is probably one of those cases.
In good faith, that Spotify will publish his work, he signed the contract.
> I don't really understand why anyone who claims to be a proponent of a free market economy has an issue with a private corporation deciding what type of content they want to broadcast.
Being a proponent of free markets doesn't prevent me from criticizing how that freedom is exercised.
> What Spotify chooses to do with it is completely up to them, even if they bought it with the express intention of "burning" it all, i.e. never broadcasting it, that would still not be censorship
It is censorship by any reasonable definition. It's just not illegal censorship.
Once you have copyright there no longer is a free market economy. In a true free market economy, anyone who has a copy would be free to distribute those missing episodes and could do so easily since the price of making additional copies is effectively zero. In a reality with copyright your argument needs to take into account the purpose of why there is copyright in the first place. In the US the original purpose of copyright was to incentivize the creation of content and locking up content goes against that.
I don't have a problem with this particular instance of deplatforming because podcasts are a highly competitive space that relies mostly on RSS still. However, "free markets" according to the original definition meant free not only from state control, but from private monopolistic rent-seeking as well. In cases where one platform is especially dominant, it's not really a free market, and in those cases, it is justified to be worried about censorship.
I think people are genuinely struggling with the idea that in some ways these corporations are nearly as powerful or more so, in certain aspects, than the government itself. It's a mindf*ck to consider that they can regulate speech on their platform because the platform itself is so encompassing, sprawling, and massive. It's not hard to understand (note: different than agreeing with) when looking at it through that lens.
You're conflating whether or not a private entity is free to do something with whether or not I agree with the soundness of that action. They are distinct.
So basically "If you are a proponent of the free market economy, you shouldn't complain about things a company does as long as they're compliant with the letter of the law."
That's an especially rich take considering the controversy is over actions a company is taking specifically to address other peoples' complaints.
Just because you are free to do something does not mean it's always a good idea to do it, and just because I support your right to do that thing does not mean that I should refrain from letting you know how I feel about it.
Don't expect any businesses to fall on a sword for ideology when their primary concern is always their bottom line. The free market has spoken. I suggest you go reread free market first principles.
You can support people's ability to make to decisions and you can tell them when you disagree. It's not government censorship, but it's still censorship.
I think the most important part here is - does the spotify deal make JR unhappy? Does it make his audience unhappy, and thus himself?
For example, if too many episodes are deleted, he will maybe not at all feel the fulfillment and happiness of doing the job he previously enjoyed. That factor ultimately decides if keeping the contract or breaking it is the better solution in the long run.
Fans of JR want him to be able to publish what he wants, since it's a proxy for having fulfilling job and successful podcast. Getting paid a lot is a forgettable factor - once that money is already safely streaming in :)
I don't get it. Maybe you're assuming things about me that don't make sense? laissez-faire capitalist is not me, at least (but I am a fish that swims in neoliberal infused water unfortunately - i.e. the culture in the western countries).
There was an uproar. What is ironic, one of the party's postulates (visible on their website as a standalone slogan) was that they want to change the law so that businesses can refuse service to any person or group for any reason.
> I don't really understand why anyone who claims to be a proponent of a free market economy has an issue with a private corporation deciding what type of content they want to broadcast.
You can but it needs to be handled through the free market. One shouldn't be asking any government to step in and make some person or company do something.
Perhaps you can support both free markets and absolutely free speech. Something that free market players should strive towards.
Then again supporting free market leads to many other unethical things than censorship. Like slavery, why shouldn't you be able to sell some person or yourself to slavery? That is entirely in accord of free markets.
If the government openly pressures Spotify, that is government censorship, which is literally what just happened.
Second:
Because there isn’t a good alternative for distribution.
There really isn’t.
Because the press employs less people nationwide than any time since … who knows, before the 1950s.
We need good information. We need uncensored information and this includes misinformation. We need to hear opinions and points of view including contrarian, controversial, and fringe ones.
I got an something important out of that Alex Jones returns episode. No one else I know thought it had any value, but for whatever reason I saw value in it.
What is the uncensored alternative? Truly.
If cloudflare can shut down whoever they want, if social media shuts down whoever they want, what is the real solution?
If we don’t have an answer, we don’t have free speech, so talking about Spotify being a private company is true but it can’t be viewed in isolation.
I believe in companies having freedom to do what they want but I also believe in civil rights. We need the civil right to prevent large corporations from discriminating against opinions they do not like.
I don't believe governments should force private companies or people to publish or say things they don't want to.
But I do think there is an issue where companies that are monopolies control large parts of public discourse.
I would prefer the right to be able to participate in public discourse without being tied to particular companies. For example, interoperability protocols for messaging and social networking.
Then people have the power to engage with who they like and companies can no longer control the flow of information in the same way. In the earlier days of the internet this is what it was like, before Facebook and Twitter monopolised and controlled information flow.
> I don't believe governments should force private companies or people to publish or say things they don't want to.
Do you believe governments should force private companies to serve people they don’t want to? If so, then you understand how civil rights work. It’s not enough to ensure the government respects our rights, the government must also ensure that private companies respect our rights. Free speech has become a civil rights issue.
I believe governments should prevent companies from discriminating against people in very limited ways. These are protected characterists such as race or sexual orientation Generally these are things that are innate to a person and are not a matter of choice for them.
I don't believe political viewpoints fall into that category, but I'm willing to hear any good arguments that they should be.
> I don't believe political viewpoints fall into that category, but I'm willing to hear any good arguments that they should be.
If you don’t believe that political viewpoints should be a protected category then you are condoning private entities pressuring the public into certain political viewpoints. If I cannot use Spotify unless I agree with their politics then that will strongly influence me to agree with their politics to the extent that their product has utility in my life, which may be to a significant degree. This may be in a situation where my politics wouldn’t ordinarily align with Spotify’s if I were left to my own critical thinking.
I believe we should generally limit the amount of influence private companies have on the political viewpoints of the population. Especially when these private companies can be very powerful corporations controlled by a relatively small amount of people. Especially in a democracy.
I do agree that the control that just a few large monopolies have over public discourse and information flow is a huge problem.
I think we need to limit their power by ensuring that no company can have such a monopoly, and I'd like to see greater choice and interoperability. Break up the network effect that gives them this control.
I don't think making political viewpoints a protected characteristic is a good way to achieve that, and would cause as many problems as it would solve.
> I don't think making political viewpoints a protected characteristic is a good way to achieve that, and would cause as many problems as it would solve.
By this logic, civil rights for race, etc. was not a good way to solve the discrimination issue. The real solution would have been to break up large companies since if there are no large companies then different races and sexes could just open up their own businesses to serve their own communities without the need to force other small business owners to serve people they do not want to serve.
But that is obviously not the problem civil rights aim to solve. Allowing companies to discriminate by any identity characteristic promotes the Balkanization of society which is something we do not want. Democrat and republican enclaves are just as fractious to the nation as white and black enclaves.
What problems would civil rights for political orientation cause that civil rights for race, sex, etc. do not cause?
You raise some excellent points, and I don't have comprehensive answers to them. At the very least you're making me re-evaluate my position.
I agree balkanisation is a big issue. We actually have that anyway with large service providers hosting everything, e.g. filter bubbles, AI driven news feeds, etc. Balkanisation in information flow can be mitigated by requiring interoperability protocols, to prevent lock-in to particular service providers.
I want to remove the ability of large companies to be able to monitor and manipulate information flow in society. Not just for political viewpoints, but for everything. So I guess I have wider goals than this specific issue.
To your question on what problems would be caused by civil rights for political viewpoints that don't apply to the others, I would return to the fact that other protected characteristics are essentially innate to a person and aren't a matter of choice, and are relatively easy to define. Pretty much anything anyone says can be viewed as a political statement, or it can be argued as such. You would have to carve out a large number of exceptions and argue them all on a case by case basis, and by law in many cases. Is hate speech permitted? Incitement to violence?
Spreading dangerous mis-information? Who assesses whether a statement is a political statement or an exception that is not protected?
I don't see the above as any kind of rebuttal of your position. I'm still thinking about your arguments, it's just what I have right now. Not sure how much longer we can go in this thread, but thanks for giving me an interesting and thought provoking debate!
> Is hate speech permitted? Incitement to violence? Spreading dangerous mis-information? Who assesses whether a statement is a political statement or an exception that is not protected?
To address this question, there is at least 200 years of US common law available to evaluate whether or not something should be protected under the first amendment. I’m simply suggesting that we protect the same rights to speech in the private sphere that we already do in the public sphere, at the very least for companies whose main line of business is serving as a platform for the speech of others that would otherwise be generally open to the public. In the age of privately owned and centralized online media platforms and marketplaces, extending civil rights to free speech seems logical.
> thanks for giving me an interesting and thought provoking debate!
> I don't really understand why anyone who claims to be a proponent of a free market economy has an issue with a private corporation deciding what type of content they want to broadcast.
Left-wing market anarchists (e.g. the C4SS) would respond that anything involving "intellectual property" is an inherently unfree market that unjustly upholds monopolies on artificially scarce immaterial goods through the threat of state violence.
From what I've seen on HN, censorship is anytime a platform, publisher or outlet divests itself of a right-wing content producer. Threads about Parler, Youtube, Gab, Parler & Cloudflare have wild levels of engagement with everything being considered censorship. But when books like Maus are removed from the shelves, we don't hear a peep out of the HN community compared to a banned twitter account.
Are you seriously saying you can't have a problem with anything a corporation ever does, as long as the motive is to make money? Else you're basically a socialist?
Does that include Monsanto poisoning the ground? Blackwater lobbying for war in the third world?
Quite to the contrary, intellectual property rights are hotly debated in free market economies and granted by the government. For the most part people aren’t 100% free market or 100% communism/whatever anyway.
I'll try to explain why I have an issue with what is happening here.
Yes, I agree with almost everything you said. However, the issue is that platforms are consolidated. Depending on your chosen format of content, there are only 2-3 viable platforms to reach people - and for some types of content, only one.
And if those very small number of platforms decide to, or are pressured to, delist content or a content creator, this is bad. Okay, you don't want to call it 'censorship', so lets invent a new term - 'kindacensorship'. Kindacensorship is identical to censorship. It has all the properties of censorship and all the negative effects of censorship.
If we had our present day internet infrastructure in the 1950s, there would have been moral outrage at, for example, gay content. And youtube and twitch and reddit would be kindacensoring all gay creators, and all who say that maybe homosexuality isn't so bad, and everything culturally adjacent to these topics. Because the majority demands it. And the majority would have demanded it, because that was the culture of the 1950s.
Then, all those gay creators would have been forced off all platforms, all internet infrastructure, and from all types of mainstream media - tv, radio, etc. Yes, they could have still written their thoughts, but it is an absolute guarantee that they'd languish in obscurity, reaching only each other, but not the masses.
(If we had our present day internet infrastructure in the 1900s, there would have been moral outrage at people talking about desegragation. Or wanting to abolish the monarchy. Or communism.)
Is it not obvious that this would have been bad? Kindacensorship would have stopped dissenters, would have halted the social evolution. And this is exactly what is happening now. The only reason silencing gay people sounds bad, and silencing Joe Rogan sounds good, is because the one message is culturally acceptable, and the other has not yet passed to the Overton window of acceptability. And if we allow kindacensorhip to grow, we will culturally stagnate. All dissenters will be silenced.
Kindacensorship is identical to censorship in form, and in function. Who cares that it's not the government banning books, and it's a (very) small cabal of technological companies deciding what can and cannot be said? Is this somehow better? I genuinely don't think it is.
And I don't know what I'm proposing, exactly. Not sure I know how I'd renegotiate the social contract. I just know that I'm seeing kindacensorship everywhere and it. is. bad.
Ok but in this precise case, podcasts have not fallen to mono/duo/trio-poly yet.
Joe Rogan made a decision to take the money and give in to a corporation trying to make a podcast monopoly a reality. Who is to complain when the inevitable abuse of power ensues? If it didn't happen now, when podcasts are still open and standardized, it would've happened later once podcasts became proprietary.
> I'm seeing kindacensorship everywhere and it. is. bad.
Everyone isn't always going to agree with you, and they have their own rights.
You're having a hard time articulating what you mean because it doesn't really make sense. If you can force someone to publish and promote something they don't want to, they can force you to publish and promote something you don't want to. The cause of liberty has not been served if this happens.
Then maybe Joe Rogan shouldn’t have sold his podcast for a large pile of money. Because in doing so he let someone else have control over his speech.
If this is a battle you want to fight, I might suggest starting with the book banning efforts by Republicans (the actual government) across many states that’s going on right now.
To my recollection, Rogan sold to Spotify with the express agreement that he would have complete control over content and publishing. It will be interesting to see what happens now.
> Yes, I agree with almost everything you said. However, the issue is that platforms are consolidated
There is no shortage of broadcast platforms. They are not consolidated. In the podcast space alone there are apple, Spotify, YouTube music, stitcher, and self-hosting. And then there are all the non-podcast broadcast modalities.
You seem to operate under the presumption that content and culture generally can only be created on major platforms. Nothing stops creators from finding other spaces to post their content. It's what sub-cultures have done pretty much throughout time -- find alternate spaces to explore ideas that might be outside of the mainstream.
It's not like Spotify is sending hit squads out to shake down artists that don't join the racket, or harass studios and sites that host content they disagree with.
There is a lot you can do with a big microphone, but perhaps the Internet isn't and never will be the utopia that people imagined it would be. In a different world where large tech companies were completely hands off and governments embraced a speech free for all, many people will still feel that they don't fit in mainstream spaces and will need to find another forum.
>You seem to operate under the presumption that content and culture generally can only be created on major platforms. Nothing stops creators from finding other spaces to post their content. It's what sub-cultures have done pretty much throughout time -- find alternate spaces to explore ideas that might be outside of the mainstream.
Yes, I agree, this used to be how things worked. Counter-culture movement appears, gains some followers, some leaders, gains momentum, and gradually or overnight breaks into the mainstream.
And this is precisely what happened here - a counter-culture movement tired with the establishment, a lot of followers, some leaders, some momentum - but the moment where change would actually happen is now impossible.
>alternate spaces
What alternate spaces? If Joe Rogan moves his podcast to Apple Music, they are going to ban him. If he had stayed on youtube, they would have removed his channel. If he creates his own app, it's going to be banned in the play store and app store. If he moves to a smaller, existing app, it's going to be protested and banned.
Yes, it's technically possible, there are some options. But they're all terrible. They are not a way to reach the mainstream.
> Is it not obvious that this would have been bad?
But what you're describing isn't some historical hypothetical nor is the current situation some brand-new phenomenon; it's literally how "content" has worked for more or less the entirety of human history. There in fact was no easily available gay content in the 1950s because society and culture demanded it not be available in the relatively small number of places available at the time where content could be consumed. Not only was gay content censored in the 1950s, but it was censored far more effectively than anything today since people had much more limited ways of obtaining content. Forget having to find a less popular podcast platform, if you were shut out of the handful of TV networks, radio stations, and newspapers, basically the only way you could have a voice is handing out leaflets on a street corner.
If the concern is that people be able to express unpopular ideas to a wide audience, we are in a far, far better place than we were at any point in history. Sure, there aren't unlimited platforms that allow you to easily reach millions and millions of people, but a few decades ago even wildly popular content would struggle to find that kind of audience and most things that were even mildly alternative would struggle to reach an audience at all.
I think the reason some people interpret the current state of affairs as some horrific free speech backsliding, even though all available evidence suggests people in general have more of a voice than ever, is that the voices that attract negative attention now are different. Historically it was usually content that was too "liberal" (for lack of a better word) that was censored, as with your gay content example. Now though, viewpoints associated with the more conservative[1] parts of society are suddenly facing unpopularity and it feels like a new thing simply because it involves people who aren't used to being on the receiving end of that kind of soft-censorship or whatever you want to call it.
My intent is not to take a specific position on whether such soft-censorship is good or bad, but if we're going to productively discuss the topic it seems like treating it as a brand new phenomenon is unlikely to get us to a useful place. In particular because in misdiagnosing the problem, we end up going down a path that's less about free expression and more about conservative ideas being entitled to a platform.
[1] Since I'm sure someone will object to this characterization, I realize Joe Rogan is generally not considered a conservative. However the views he's expressed that have caused the current Spotify trouble are definitely associated with conservatives in America.
I don't understand why people seem to be so befuddled by the concept that there can be legal actions which are not ethical or moral. I can legally buy a new puppy every month and give it to the pound. This is morally wrong, even despite agreeing that giving animals to the pound should be legal.
I see this same argument constantly, in nearly every discussion about a company doing anything bad. It's a meaningless point. Do you people posting things like this really not understand the distinction between right and legal? Or do you think moral considerations are beneath discussion?
I can be a proponent of free markets and against constructs that are anti competitive. When products are bundled (like with Microsoft’s Office subscriptions or Spotify), or when products have network effects (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter), or when they have a large number of users, or a large market cap, the free market already no longer exists. Choice becomes limited and barriers to entry become higher. These companies’ products start to become as important and influential as any public space or service. That’s where regulation is needed. And with all of the big tech platforms, they need to be regulated to not allow users to be denied or discriminated against due to their political views. The alternative is they are split up. But the free market definitely doesn’t exist right now.
Take a look at what happened with Parler. It was a rare successful challenger, although small by comparison, to big social media. Then AOC pressured a few companies to ban Parler and they all complied - whether to build favor with legislators that might regulate them or because it aligned with their politics. The claim that people can just build their own platform doesn’t work in a market this distorted.
As for your redefinition of censorship - I disagree. Legal or contractual allowance doesn’t change what it is. This is censorship.
>I don't really understand why anyone who claims to be a proponent of a free market economy has an issue with a private corporation deciding what type of content they want to broadcast.
What I don't understand is how this idea comes up every time something like this is discussed. I'm assuming that this does not receive convincing counter-arguments which is why I will attempt to do so here.
Almost everyone who believes in free markets (except maybe a very few libertarian anarchists) belives in regulation of the markets to restrict bad actors or unintended harmful side effects to the market or the people in general.
Being a proponent of free markets does not mean that you support the idea that market participants can break the laws for the sake of the markets. It also does not mean that one believes the existing laws and regulations are correct and sufficient. Everyone understands that it is an organic process where companies will test the regulations and regulatory bodies have to monitor and act on it constantly.
Some of it requires affected people discussing it and making the regulators and market participants know about the bad effects they feel so that something can be done about it, in one way or another.
I can imagine there being regulations forcing these content hosting platforms to not be able to take down content unless it is explicitly breaking the law as long as they are being compensated for it with no price discrimination. Similar regulations already apply to a lot of businesses.
> What I don't understand is how this idea comes up every time something like this is discussed. I'm assuming that this does not receive convincing counter-arguments which is why I will attempt to do so here.
I believe it's because there has not been a consistently applied general principle of free markets articulated, which the removal of episodes here violates.
The problem is not that private companies doing whatever they wish to do with his content. Spotify in normal times would have no incentives to delete those episodes. It seems the governments in US are enforcing censorship through private sector in the name of disinformation. I urge you to see the recent comments from White House press secy, congressional hearings and so on who insist private sector do more of the dirty work of censorship for them because they don’t like certain point of views. They know they can’t pass a bill that can stand the ground of taking out those contents without standing constitutional challenges.
I'm very confused as to how you think the government is involved with this issue. Is Neil Young a government official? Or is it empirically false to claim that Joe Rogan is actively peddling false information that is directly impacting people by way of, ya know, dying?
I think this is a simple example of the people with wallets using said wallets to indicate what they will and won't tolerate.
"White House urges Spotify to take further action on Joe Rogan: ‘More can be done’"
"White House press secretary Jen Psaki called on music and podcast streaming giant Spotify to do “more” in the fight against Covid-19 misinformation on Tuesday.
At her daily press briefing, President Joe Biden’s top spokeswoman was asked about a decision by the company to add disclaimers linking to Covid-19 information hubs to any piece of content that includes discussion of the pandemic, vaccines, or Covid-19 itself. She responded that the change was a good step, but that the company could take steps (if it wanted) to actively prohibit content that contained misinformation that experts have warned is prolonging the pandemic and leading to more deaths."
The company began to censor because people complained. Also, the federal government threatened them just days ago (I’m not sure if this sounds like a free market mechanic to me, what do you think?). People are free to call for censorship. People are also free to complain about the censorship. It’s part of the whole free market process.
What is the issue here? It sounds like you only like half the coin.
It was Joe's content to do with as he pleased, and his decision was to sell it and allow someone else to do with it as they pleased.
That's simple enough, but it's also simplistic because it assumes that property rights are the only thing we should care about.
Which value is more important - property rights (which depend on socialized services like justice and enforcement) or free speech (which thrive by removing regulation)?
You should ask Joe that. If Joe decided to sell he 100% had to have known that they will get to choose which parts of his content from the past to distribute until the end of their contract.
There's also another issue: the customer wanting to listen to those podcasts and who valued them as part of their Spotify subscription.
And that's not due to free market "those didn't were listened to enough, so we took them off" (that wasn't the case, and even if it was storage and distribution costs are negligible anyway, they could still keep them in perpetuity).
Instead that customer got shafted because "some" forced Spotify's hand.
> Which value is more important - property rights (which depend on socialized services like justice and enforcement) or free speech (which thrive by removing regulation)?
Don't ask us, ask J.R.. He remains free to return the 100 million to Spotify and broadcast his stupid crap elsewhere.
Uh, it is? A business contract isn't indentured servitude. You can always break a contract. There will be consequences, but they are civil consequences, most likely losing a bunch of money.
>It was Joe's content to do with as he pleased, and his decision was to sell it and allow someone else to do with it as they pleased.
And they did. They published those episodes.
Consistently with a free market, customers of Spotify should also be able to do with them as they pleased - listen to them or not, or even leave Spotify in protest.
Instead, some pressure groups, the media, and a couple of unrelated musicians forced Spotify to unpublish those.
How did anyone "force" Spotify to do anything? Various people put public pressure on Spotify and Spotify took the action that it presumably thought was optimal for its bottom line. Which companies do all the time.
By making it costly not to do it, not in a free market (vote with wallets) way, but in a "will hurt you with bad publicity, government pressure, etc" way. Forcing doesn't need to be a gun in the head of the CEO.
>Various people put public pressure on Spotify and Spotify took the action that it presumably thought was optimal for its bottom line. Which companies do all the time.
Yes, like corporations did when they censored works because of pressure groups, like Tipper Gore's, stuff that promoted "homosexuality" or "decadent" black music in the past, etc.
Doesn't mean it was left to the individual customers to decide, or that corporations deemed the works they sold as unprofitable in themselves (that is, not selling).
Because bad publicity is not a buy-not buy choice, and the decision to take the episodes down wasn't because they didn't have enough audience to be profitable.
There is a concept that we don't interfere with each others lives. If someone has views you don't like, and he never forces them on you, you gotta let it go. For example, a bunch of people chose Jesus, and an other bunch chose Mohammed. Long standing tradition so far was to accept this, and let it go, because alternative is a literal war. Violence. Nobody wants violence, so there are even laws that make it illegal to deny service because of one's religion. And it's not a little deal, for religious person it's about eternal life, so someone believing in wrong god is hugely offensive. Coming back to Spotify, there are a bunch of people who hold beliefs which are considered incorrect, and they are being marginalized and excluded from all avenues to express themselves. It's not Spotify, it's Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and pretty much everything else. When it's a single business that decides to exclude Christians, it's one story, but when it's an organized campaign, then we have a problem, because there will be war
"For example, a bunch of people chose Jesus, and an other bunch chose Mohammed. Long standing tradition so far was to accept this, and let it go, because alternative is a literal war."
The long-standing tradition has been war. The long-standing tradition has been war even among those that made the same choice but think that means something slightly different.
JR sold his catalog of intellectual property (podcast episodes) of his own free will and was paid very well for it: about $100M from what I can gather. What Spotify chooses to do with it is completely up to them, even if they bought it with the express intention of "burning" it all, i.e. never broadcasting it, that would still not be censorship. That would be nothing but exercising their intellectual property rights, that they paid for, just like buying the rights to a song that you hate to stop that specific recording from ever being played again is within your right, or even negotiating with the artist to never play it again.
He signed a "multi-year" exclusive deal (the details are fuzzy, for obvious reasons) which means he sold his trademark and time for money, which is how the market works.
Exactly what he sold (NDA, limitations on his speech in his free time etc.) we'll probably never know, but whoever calls this "censorship" needs a reality check. There exists plenty of proper censorship in the world if you look for it, and this isn't it.