He can do what he likes: Inside Spotifys love affair with Joe Rogans misinformation – The Independent

You can say whatever you want were on Spotify.

Those were Joe Rogans words of reassurance to a podcast guest when she paused to joke that she would be arrested for what she said next. Like, YouTubes not gonna pull it, he went on, prompting her laughter. Were in a weird realm.

The remarks, made during Rogans interview with Canadian anti-transgender writer Meghan Murphy last August, reflects a difficult truth for the worlds largest music streaming platform as it seeks to extend its dominance, and becomes a media company in its own right.

Under heavy political pressure tech giants like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have increased efforts to tackle misinformation on their platforms during the pandemic, tightening their rules and hiring third-party fact-checkers (albeit with limited success).

Audio streaming platforms like Spotify have so far escaped a similar level of scrutiny. But the Swedish-based, public company is now being forced to grapple with questions of its responsibility over misinformation and pseudoscience as it makes exclusive multimillion-dollar deals with popular podcasters.

Its flagship grab is undoubtedly The Joe Rogan Experience, Spotifys number one podcast, whose colourful and free-wheeling host was paid a reported $100m in early 2020 for exclusive rights to his show.

This week, Rogan once again proved the tricky balancing act for Spotify. In a four-hour interview, broadcast on Tuesday, he gave the self-help author and anti-feminist mystic, Dr Jordan Peterson, a platform to claim without evidence that climate science has no basis in reality, and that solar power kills more people than nuclear.

Its the latest example of Rogan and his guests appearing to have free rein to spread false claims and conspiracy theories, which in the past have spanned topics from the coronavirus vaccine and Dr Anthony Fauci to transgender people.

In some instances, Rogans words appeared to break with what Spotify has said publicly about Covid-19 misinformation.

The streaming service has previously told news outlets that it bans false or dangerous deceptive content about COVID-19, which may cause offline harm and/or pose a direct threat to public health.

It also claims to have removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic.

Yet no misinformation policy is listed in Spotifys user guidelines or in summaries of prohibited content on the company website. Spotify did not respond to a list of questions from The Independent seeking clarity on its policies surrounding misinformation.

Spotify has a hate speech policy on its website banning content that expressly and principally promotes, advocates, or incites hatred or violence against people based on characteristics such as race, sex, and sexual orientation.

Rogan has showed time and time and again that he will misinform his audience on Spotify and wont face any repercussions for doing so, says Alex Paterson, a senior researcher with the left-wing campaign group Media Matters for America, who listened to over 300 hours of the podcast in 2021.

Spotifys complete failure to mitigate Rogans harmful rhetoric about the pandemic demonstrates clearly that when it comes to their top podcast host [the stated] policy is just a hollow PR strategy.

Theres no such thing as climate

Rogan, who is also a stand-up comedian and a combat sports commentator, was Spotifys most-listened podcaster in both 2020 and 2021.

Before his deal with the company he had an estimated 11 million downloads per episode, although that figure likely included some automatic downloads that were never listened to. According to Chartmetrics and Viberate, two analytics companies, his audience is mostly young men aged 18-35 in English-speaking countries.

That is a familiar audience to Dr Peterson, who is not a climate scientist but a clinical psychologist who became famous for his anti-political correctness views, attacks on the trans community, arguments that white privilege isnt real, and defence of the patriarchy.

Climate is about everything, okay, says Dr Peterson on the episode. But your models arent based on everything. Your models are based on a set number of variables. So that means youve reduced the variables which are everything to that set.

Well, how did you decide which set of variables to include in the equation if its about everything? [...] Because your models do not and cannot model everything.

At one point, Rogan acknowledges that his guest went on these rants but continues the conversation on climate change. Dr Peterson then alleges, with zero factual basis, that more people die every year from solar energy than die from nuclear.

Asked what he means, Dr Peterson laughs and says: No, you fall off the roof when youre installing it ... gravity! He describes this as a good example of unintended consequences.

Dr Petersons claims were widely panned as "climate denial", "wackadoo" and "completely wrong". John Cook, who studies climate change denial narratives at the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub in Melbourne, Australia, toldThe Independent that they were very old, debunked arguments that Ive seen a million times over the last decade and a half.

Dr Cook added: He talks as if hes saying something insightful, but its a complete misunderstanding of how science works.

Dr Peterson did not respond to a request to comment from The Independent.

Joe Rogan guest claims pandemic is just a money grab, they are trying to kill us

Climate denial is nothing new, and has been around for as long as scientists have been sounding the alarm on the fact that humans are causing the steep rise in global temperatures, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels. Its less common, however, for climate myths to be pumped into the auditory canals of millions with only a glancing, credulous attempt at being challenged.

Podcasts are very intimate, says Dr Cook. Its like youre listening in on a conversation.

Rogans just asking questions style in which he seeks out fringe figures with unusual perspectives and mostly listens non-judgmentally actually plays into a highly common climate denial tactic, Dr Cook notes, that of spuriously casting doubt on scientific conclusions.

Joe Rogan vs Neil Young

Rogans statements about Covid-19 and its vaccines have attracted anger, as has his choice of guests to discuss the pandemic.

One recent interview was with Dr Robert Malone, an infectious disease specialist banned from Twitter for spreading misinformation. Dr Malone has questioned the Covid jabs effectiveness and falsely suggested that millions of people had been hypnotised into believing that the vaccines work to prevent serious disease.

Rogan has claimed that young people and children should not get the vaccine and inaccurately stated they are gene therapy. He has promoted the anti-parasite drug Ivermectin, whose effect on coronavirus remains unclear, and suggested that prolific conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was right to worry about microchips being hidden in Covid vaccines.

On the other hand, Rogan has also given a platform to an authoritative medical figure, Dr Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon and chief medical correspondent for CNN.

Still, Mr Paterson of Media Matters for America says: [Rogan] plays a crucial role in the right-wing echo chamber by amplifying vaccine sceptics and coronavirus conspiracy theorists, says Mr Paterson, of Media Matters for America.

Dr Malones appearance prompted a group of doctors and scientists to sign an online petition calling on Spotify to adopt policies to prevent the spread of misinformation on its platform.

By allowing the propagation of false and societally harmful assertions, Spotify is enabling its hosted media to damage public trust in scientific research and sow doubt in the credibility of data-driven guidance offered by medical professionals, the letter read. It had been signed by more than 1,300 people as of Friday.

The veteran rocker Neil Young took issue with Rogans coronavirus misinformation and asked Spotify to remove his music this week.

They can have Rogan or Young. Not both, he wrote on his website.

Neil Young on stage in Quebec in 2018

(Alice Cliche / AFP via Getty Images)

Spotify has removed Youngs music from the platform, saying: We regret Neils decision to remove his music from Spotify, but hope to welcome him back soon.

The Joe Rogan episode with Dr Malone remains available.

Announcing his Spotify deal in 2020, Rogan stressed to his audience that it will be exactly the same show and that Spotify wont have any creative control.

Since then, he has repeatedly boasted about his freedom. Spotify has given me no pushback whatsoever. Its been amazing, he said in September. And in May, he said: Theyre f***ing great. They dont say s***.

He added: I tested it, too like when I brought Alex Jones on? I was like lets see! You guys talk a lot of s***, lets see! That f***ing guy is right way more than hes wrong.

Taking the biggest bite

All this comes as Spotify colonises the podcasting industry at breakneck pace.

Having launched in 2008, it is already the worlds largest music streaming service, according to Midia Research, controlling one-third of the market compared to 15 per cent for its next largest competitor, Apple music.

The company reports that it has 381 million users, including 172 million subscribers, across 184 markets and hosts 70 million tracks, including more than 3.2 million podcast titles. Some estimates now suggest it has a bigger podcast audience than Apple, the free app that comes pre-installed on every iPhone.

Joe Rogan continues to ignore covid science even as he reads it out loud

Among the 20,000 podcast episodes that Spotify claims to have removed due to vaccine misinformation include that of Australian anti-vaxxer and celebrity chef Pete Evans.

The policy applies to music too: Spotify reportedly nixed a controversial anti-lockdown song by Stone Roses frontman Ian Brown last March.

In 2018, it deleted several episodes of Infowars, a radio show hosted by Alex Jones, for hate speech. The interview with Mr Jones on The Joe Rogan Experience, is still available.

Spotify has not left Rogan completely alone. It has removed as many as 42 episodes dating from before his exclusive deal with the streaming service, including interviews with far right figures such as activist Milo Yiannopolous and Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes.

Spotifys chief executive, Daniel Ek, has said that he does not believe Spotify has any editorial responsibility over its podcasts.

"We have a lot of really well-paid rappers too that make tens of millions of dollars, if not more, each year from Spotify, Mr Ek told Axios last year. And we dont dictate what theyre putting in their songs, either."

Audio misinformation is harder to challenge

Until recently misinformation on Spotify has flown under the radar compared to social networks such as Facebook, Dr Cook says.

One reason is because audio content is more difficult to search through and scrutinise compared to the short snippets of text, often tied to a URL, found on other platforms.

In the past, Dr Cooks team has used artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse data from blogs and think-tank publications, but he says that would be much harder to do with podcasts.

That makes it more difficult to track and challenge the reach of climate misinformation on Spotify even as the company boasts about its own green credentials and says it is listening to the science.

This is a really massive problem, says Dr Valerie Wirtschafter, a senior data analyst at the Brookings Institution, who has studied how disinformation spread through podcasts on the Big Lie that victory had been stolen from Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

Dr Wirtschafter and her colleague Dr Chris Meserole, director of research for Brookings AI and Emerging Technology Initiative, are undertaking new research which will analyse 79 podcasts and 37,000 episodes for verifiable falsehoods on the Covid pandemic, while also exploring broader disinformation including climate denial.

Figuring out the reach of audio disinformation is critical due to how listeners respond to the medium.

The [podcast hosts] are in your ear, youre often listening to them alone, you choose when to start these episodes, Dr Wirtschafter says, noting that research has shown that people are more likely to incorporate information they hear from podcasts into their beliefs.

Theres an intimacy factor, she added. These hosts often develop identities, personalities that people gravitate toward. Thats really important in this conversation. On the flip side of that intimacy, theres this implicit level of trust that gets built. But that podcaster could be anybody.

Why Spotify needs Joe Rogan

The big question is: will Spotify ever part ways with its number one podcasting star? According to John Sullivan, a professor at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania who studies podcasting and tech industries, that is not likely.

Spotify honestly couldnt have cared less about Joe Rogan; what they wanted was Joe Rogans audience, says Professor Sullivan.

He argues that Spotify should not be seen as a media company, because its game plan is simply to suck as much of the podcast industry into its platform as possible, with each exclusive content deal a means to that end.

Traditionally, podcasts have been distributed via web links that made it hard to measure their audience and almost impossible to censor them.

By contrast, Spotify is a very sophisticated surveillance machine that tracks every second of its users listening, helping it develop recommendation algorithms that keep subscribers on board and sell targeted adverts aimed at non-subscribers.

As such, Prof Sullivan says the company needs to grow as big as possible as quickly as it can so that it can become dominant before regulators and politicians grow restive.

If it can get to that point, then, like Facebook, it will be rich enough to resist or adapt to whatever new regulations come its way.

At the moment its fair to say that Spotify needs [Rogan] more than the other way around, says Prof Sullivan. Its in a moment now where its trying to maximise its growth as quickly as possible. Someone like Joe Rogan is in an ideal position, because he holds the keys to that growth so that probably gives him a level of confidence about saying and doing whatever he would like.

He adds that Spotifys reported $100m investment in Mr Rogan will make it harder to give him up, to say nothing of the public firestorm it could ignite by deplatforming him.

The current approach may already be bearing fruit. According to Chartmetrics, Joe Rogans followers on Instagram are posting about Spotify more often over time, having started out less interested in it than the average user.

However, musicians might be able to force its hand if they follow the path of Young and pull their content from the service. A big enough boycott, Prof Sullivan says, would bite into Spotifys core revenue.

In the meantime, Dr Cook believes that Spotifys supposed rules against dangerous Covid-19 misinformation should be extended to other kinds.

While many tech giants put false Covid claims in a different category, saying they can directly cause harm to life and limb, Dr Cook says this is short-sighted.

Covid misinformation is much more immediate, says Dr Cook. People will hear something, and then theyll step outside and not wear a mask, or they wont get vaccinated, or they wont socially distance.

Climate misinformation is more complicated, because its such a holistic issue. Its long-term, its global. Its harder to get our head around, but the threat is actually much greater than Covid misinformation because its this existential problem on a global scale, decades and centuries into the future.

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He can do what he likes: Inside Spotifys love affair with Joe Rogans misinformation - The Independent