Spotify has announced will add ‘content advisories’, i.e. trigger warnings, to podcast episodes that discuss COVID-19, directing people to the platform’s ‘COVID-19 Guide‘, which includes podcasts by BBC News, the Economist, the New Scientist, the Guardian and Nature. In addition, it has published its ‘Platform Rules‘, which include the following description of ‘Dangerous Content’ that will be banned from the music streaming platform:
Content that promotes dangerous false or dangerous deceptive medical information that may cause offline harm or poses a direct threat to public health includes, but may not be limited to:
– asserting that AIDS, COVID-19, cancer or other serious life threatening diseases are a hoax or not real
– encouraging the consumption of bleach products to cure various illnesses and diseases
– promoting or suggesting that vaccines approved by local health authorities are designed to cause death
– encouraging people to purposely get infected with COVID-19 in order to build immunity to it (e.g. promoting or hosting “coronavirus parties”)
These announcements are clearly intended as a sop to the musical artists and others who are unhappy about Spotify’s decision not to remove Joe Rogan’s podcast in response to Neil Young’s threat to withdraw his music unless it did. But will they be sufficient to quell the rebellion? According to the Verge, which broke the story, an internal memo revealed that Joe Rogan’s podcast doesn’t “meet the threshold for removal” under these new rules.
The Verge also reports that an earlier draft of the ‘Platform Rules’ went further:
[C]ompared to the document posted internally and viewed by the Verge, the wording on examples has changed, and one line is missing entirely. It specifically called out “Suggesting that wearing a mask will cause the wearer imminent, life-threatening physical harm”.
Daniel Ek, the billionaire founder and CEO of Spotify, is keen to stress how on message he is when it comes to COVID-19 – unlike his pesky podcaster. In the announcement in the Spotify Newsroom, he writes:
I want you to know that from the very first days of the pandemic, Spotify has been biased toward action. We launched a variety of educational resources and campaigns to raise awareness and we developed and promoted a global COVID-19 Information Hub. We donated ad inventory to various organisations for vaccine awareness, funds to the World Health Organisation and COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) to increase vaccine equity and supported the Go Give One fundraising campaign. And we established a music relief project to support the creative community. While this is not a complete list, I hope it gives you a sense of how seriously we’ve approached the pandemic as a company.
I trust our policies, the research and expertise that inform their development, and our aspiration to apply them in a way that allows for broad debate and discussion, within the lines.
Within the lines. Interesting phrase. Rogan is currently “within the lines”, but that may change. Note that the ‘Platform Rules’ setting out what you’re not allowed to say, i.e. what’s outside the lines, “includes, but may not be limited to” the various things it explicitly prohibits. So the CEO has given himself the wiggle room to shift the line so Rogan ends up on the wrong side of it.
You can read more about this story on the Post-Millennial.
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