What Spotify should learn from the Joe Rogan affair
The content-moderation wars have come to audio
WHEN NEIL YOUNG and Joni Mitchell saw an injustice, they used to attack it by writing protest songs, taking on racism in the “Southern Man” and the Vietnam war in “The Fiddle and the Drum”. Today, the two musicians prefer to speak out by pressing the mute button. The pair have withdrawn their recordings from Spotify, the world’s biggest music streamer, in protest at “The Joe Rogan Experience”, a podcast that gave airtime to anti-vaxxers. Spotify has decided to hang on to its podcaster.
This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline “Free speech’s new frontier”
Leaders February 5th 2022
From the February 5th 2022 edition
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