Joe Rogan and Spotify: It Isn’t About Free Speech The Skidmore News – Skidmore News

Image sourced from The Economic Times.

This article is published under the Opinions Section of The Skidmore News.

In May 2020, when the pandemic was still in its infancy, Spotify paid over $100,000,000 to become the exclusive platform of mixed martial arts commentator Joe Rogans popular Joe Rogan Experience (JRE) podcast. Now, nearly 2 years later, this decision, which received relatively little media coverage at the time, is coming back to bite them. In the interim, Rogan has built a reputation for medical misinformation, promoting unsupported alternative therapies for COVID-19 and telling his audience that they do not need to get vaccinated. He also has come under fire for using his platform to spread hatred toward minorities to his millions of listeners, having repeatedly used anti-Black racial slurs and compared transgender people to satanic ritual abuse.

This controversy came to a head on January 24, 2022, when multi-Platinum certified Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young demanded that Spotify stop distributing Rogan or they would lose access to his own discography. Two days later, all of his music was removed from the site, and in the subsequent days, multiple other artists joined Young in pulling music and podcasts, most notably Joni Mitchell.

The effect was swift. Spotifys market value plummeted more than $4,000,000,000 in the week following the announcement, and many subscribers scrambled to cancel their subscriptions. In an attempt at damage control, Spotify published content guidelines (which still do not seem to affect Rogan) and claimed that they would place content warnings before podcasts discussing COVID-19. Meanwhile, after it was revealed that over 100 episodes of the podcast contained Rogan saying racial slurs, Spotify removed these episodes (though allowed numerous other episodes promoting hate to remain available).

Meanwhile, Rogan has become the latest right wing celebrity to play the victim of cancel culture, with others parading him as a warrior for free speech. However, commentators that reduce this controversy to free speech completely misunderstand the situation. This was never about free speech.

Free speech is one of the most frequently misunderstood topics in US political discourse, so it is important to remember the original definition:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. -Amendment I, US Constitution

Astute readers will notice that this law does not mention private corporations or platforms. This is because it does not guarantee a right to a platform. The First Amendments only stipulation about speech is that the US government may not restrict it by act of Congress. There is no right to a platform, nor a requirement for any other individual or entity to listen to, support, or amplify ones speech.

Spotify is a private corporation. As such, people are in no way entitled to hosting on Spotify, and Spotify can enforce its own terms of service. The same is true of all streaming services and social media platforms; since these entities are not parts of the US government, the First Amendment does not negate their terms of service and prevent them from controlling what they host on their site.

The issue of freedom of speech is therefore not relevant to whether or not Spotify should host Joe Rogan. If they were to remove his show, his First Amendment rights would not be violated, as the government would not be using any legislative means to restrict his speech. He would still be able to say anything he wants to, he simply would not have a multi-billion-dollar corporation broadcasting his words to millions of listeners every week. Additionally, Spotify paid Rogan over $100,000,000 for the exclusive rights to his podcast. There is no right to being paid for ones speech, either, and while Spotify cannot rescind the money they have given him, they could choose to avoid future deals.

Nor is Neil Youngs protest a violation of any individuals right to freedom of speech. As Young explicitly stated himself, I support free speech. I have never been in favor of censorship. Private companies have the right to choose what they profit from, just as I can choose not to have my music support a platform that disseminates harmful information. Young is also not the government, and in asking Spotify to choose between him and Rogan, he was allowing them as a corporation to make a choice. They chose Rogan, and Young exercised his own choice to remove the music. There is no obligation for Young to keep his music on any platform that he does not support.

As Young said, Spotify can choose whom they promote and profit off of, and they have exercised this choice before. In 2017, after the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Spotify and other streaming services removed many artists who promoted white nationalism and racism, and the mainstream political establishment had no similar outcry about free speech at the time. This is not that different from the situation then, as Rogan has been criticized for repeatedly using racial slurs and for promoting false and hateful ideas about minorities. However, from an optics standpoint, defending Rogan is seen as much more acceptable than defending small racist artists, so the establishment rallies around him.

The public cannot control Spotifys decisions of what artists to platform, and can debate endlessly about whether or not Rogan should be removed from the site, but that is a separate discussion. The author of this piece is of the opinion that he should be removed, due to his promotion of vaccine misinformation and hate. However, framing this as a freedom of speech issue is incorrect from a legal perspective and distracts from actual discourse about the responsibility of corporations, disinformation, and platforming.

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Joe Rogan and Spotify: It Isn't About Free Speech The Skidmore News - Skidmore News