No, it's not. It's about as tyrannical as a chef deciding what meals she serves in her own restaurant. While we're on the topic of Western civilization, people deciding what they do with their own property in their private businesses is actually the basis of Western civilization, in contrast to the apparently now mainstream take that they ought to be compelled to host something they don't want to host.

A tyrant is someone who puts dissidents up against the wall and puts a bullet in their head, not a streaming platform deciding what they want to stream.

How is it tyranny? Under the most liberal definition tyranny is: "cruel, unreasonable, or arbitrary use of power or control."

It certainly is not cruel for any definition of cruel I am familiar with. It certainly isn't arbitrary, Spotify is not doing this on a whim and it isn't taking down all the episodes, it clearly is being very deliberate, though you may disagree with their process. The only one could be unreasonable, but what exactly makes this unreasonable? Again, you may disagree with their reasoning, but it is not an unreasonable position.

Why don't we back off this extreme rhetoric that plagues our conversations today?

> It certainly isn't arbitrary... [a]gain, you may disagree with their reasoning, but it is not an unreasonable position.

Those are slightly incorrect interpretations of the words 'arbitrary' and 'unreasonable'.

Reasonable doesn't mean 'has reasons'. Every decisions has reasons. If a king decides to chop someone's head off he had reasons - he felt like it. Being reasonable/unreasonable is about whether an opinion can be changed by evidence and argument. Almost all moderation is unreasonable, I've very rarely seen a moderator make a call and then not stick with it (being unreasonable isn't always a bad thing). Reasonableness is a judgement call on the quality of the reasons behind a decision.

Similarly, arbitrary doesn't mean unpredictable. It is a judgement call on whether the reasons behind an action are reasonable. Being done on behalf of a policy doesn't make an action reasonable.

It is quite an easily sustainable argument that any content moderation policy is arbitrary. Compare European vs American media norms around moderating sex - it is pretty easy to argue by comparison some of the standards floating around are arbitrary, because standards differ but both continents produce great media which involves sex.

arbitrary: "based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system."

None of these are by personal whim, there is clearly a process/system in place to determine whether an episode should stay.

unreasonable: "not guided by or based on good sense" and "beyond the limits of acceptability or fairness." Sorry, I just don't see how these decisions could be considered unreasonable. You may disagree with the moral sense of why they are doing this, you may disagree that that is good sense, but that would be best, your opinion, not some empirically correct point of view.

> there is clearly a process/system in place to determine whether an episode should stay.

Which system are you thinking of? There is probably just a content moderation group that makes aye/nay calls. A system is something like judicial review of police actions, or that strange independent review council that Facebook is setting up.

Spotify's 'system' is going to boil down to someone making arbitrary calls. There isn't a science to it.

> Sorry, I just don't see how these decisions could be considered unreasonable.

Millions of people endorse Joe Rogan, he is a benchmark of what acceptability means. Joe Rogan talking about something is almost definitely marking it as something that is a matter of interest to the public and a legit topic of conversation.

He is far more qualified to decide what is and isn't acceptable to his audience and the public discourse than Spotify, some random corporation filled with people who passed a job interview.

Censoring his content is unreasonable by default, unless Spotify has a really compelling argument.

I'm not certain that tyrants pay their employees $100 million.

He is being more than fairly compensated. They don't have to host his white nationalist content.

They pay him handsomely for the privilege of removing the episodes where he uncritically nods along with the likes of Stephan Moleneaux and Alex Jones.

Downvote away, but without some public platform, you'll never understand and combat these people.

See: Hells Angels interviews on primetime TV in the 70s-80s etc at the peak of the fear surrounding them.

The public platform being the Internet. Nobody forced Rogan to move their content to a closed platform like Spotify. Before that they seemed to be able to discuss what they wanted with who they wanted. But instead of their freedom of content production, they picked the money. That's as simple as that. If they want to keep producing "freedom" content they just have to break the contract (and give back some of the money) or produce under another name on self owned platform (and build back the community).

Is it tyranny to force a business to sell, say, a wedding cake, to a customer they don't like?

Or is it tyranny to not force a business to accept everyone, even if they don't comply with social norms like, say, wearing a mask?