Spotify: What to Do with Rogan?

By  CJ SMITH ’25

The idea of “free speech” in the first amendment has always been a battleground of “ambiguity.” Since the Wall Street Journal’s coverage on the “Facebook Files,” Americans have become increasingly aware of the extent to which social media moguls control and manipulate public discourse, the extent to which what we perceive as “free speech” may not be so free after all.

It’s important to recognize that most social platforms adopt a “free-speech” model, one that sees all opinions, criticisms, musings as equal. Spotify, albeit a music streaming service, is no exception to this pattern. Its mission is “to unlock the potential of human creativity—by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art and billions of fans the opportunity to enjoy and be inspired by it.” The recent Joe Rogan controversy represents a fraction of the complicated relationship between platforms and their users.

Misinformation exists in all pockets of the digital world and incurs harm ultimately because companies have no incentive to control or remove it from their platforms. Part of this can be attributed to the Communications Decency Act, better known as Section 230. This law resolves social media companies of liability to any consequences of content posted on their platforms. For example, if someone posted misinformation (let’s say COVID misinformation) that led to real world harm (overdosing on ivermectin), the family of the dead person couldn’t sue the platform on which the misinformation was circulated. Therefore, social media companies have no requirement to remove false information off their platforms, and in fact, they have an incentive to keep misinformation on their platforms. That incentive is ad revenue.

The MIT Technology Review found that, in 2018, Facebook paid over $1.5 billion to content publishers and didn’t conduct that much quality control on them. This led to an enormous rise in clickbait and false articles, the most salient consequence of which was Facebook’s fueling of the Rohingya Muslim genocide by the Myannmar government. Facebook’s investment in content creation directly led to profits for them with the rise of ad revenue on the site, but it also recognized Facebook as a funder and beneficiary of harmful misinformation. Many other social media companies have followed Facebook’s profit strategy, and as such, misinformation has become rampant on all parts of the internet.

I believe that the lines of free speech are blurred significantly when determining what is misinformation and what is not. Especially in the age where algorithms run platforms, deciding what could produce harmful effects on society is immensely challenging. Nobody knows if a post will end up producing real-world impacts. To quote data scientist Cathy O’Neil, “They (Google) don’t know what truth is.” Therefore, I won’t give a personal opinion on whether Joe Rogan should be removed from Spotify. However, whatever Spotify does, they need to remain consistent. Banning Rogan but allowing other disinformation to exist on Spotify defeats the purpose of the mission of it and every other platform on the internet. For now, labeling Rogan’s content with a warning remains the safest route for the platform. Hopefully, Spotify will stay cautious about removing content and will remain a free platform for all creators. If not, it becomes the Facebook of the streaming industry, elevating some user’s speech above others while deciding who has the right to produce content and who doesn’t. 

By  AVEEN BURNEY ’25

Spotify has the responsibility to mitigate the spread of misinformation on its platform, and Joe Rogan is nothing more than a misinformation machine. Rogan has undermined the efficacy of the vaccine and has made multiple baseless claims, from promoting ivermectin to calling the vaccine a “mass formation psychosis.” Rogan’s enormous audience of 11 million people enables this type of misinformation to impact the American people in a massively negative way. The fact that hundreds of medical experts signed an open letter to Spotify denouncing his lies says it all. 

Spotify is making us believe that this incident is about censorship and free speech, when in reality, it’s about money. Facebook used the same excuse. They have had special exemptions for politicans and celebrities. Put simply, the more speech, the more advertising revenue. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube remove content posted by regular people every day. Some may ask, what about Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene? They removed them only when it became a business imperative. 

Neil Young declared an ultimatum to Spotify: “They can have Neil Young or Rogan. Not both.” Joni Mitchell and many other artists have followed. To me, Young and Mitchell are icons and giants of their own time, and as a user of Spotify, I was devastated that I won’t be able to listen to their music. However, from a business perspective, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young do not outweigh his listeners. ​​It is reported that Spotify paid $100 million for the exclusive rights, and it has been noted that his show has increased its ad revenue. Due to the fact that Spotify is the exclusive rights holder for the podcast, it has more of a responsibility over Rogan than social media companies. It has the onus to act like a social media and handle the content. 

Joe Rogan has said some more than questionable comments and has had some horrible guests on his podcast like Alex Jones, who claimed that the Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting was a hoax. His content deserves warning labels, but putting warning labels or more carefully vetting guests won’t stop the spread of misinformation. A great example is the 2020 election, with constant misinformation being spread about candidates, and the pandemic as a whole, with conspiracies about the vaccine, many promoted by Joe Rogan.

In the end, it is Rogan’s listeners that have to pay the true price. This should not be about whether the first amendment or human creativity is under fire when people’s lives and health are. Jessica Rivera, an infection disease epidemiologist said, “We have an infodemic going on that is prolonging the pandemic and it is causing people to make bad choices and actually die. These are preventable illnesses that folks like Joe Rogan are directly responsible for.”