I don't think this is some irreconcilable gotcha. I support the free market as a tool when it delivers on the benefits that it can provide. Those are increasing choice and decreasing costs through increased competition and commoditization. If problems show up I'm happy to have legislation introduced to tackle those, such as not allowing food with known toxins to be sold.

It's like any tool. I support cars when they're used to deliver on the benefits that they can provide; getting people from point A to point B, and giving them the freedom to move between arbitrary locations. When they're used to run pedestrians over then I don't support that usage, and I will support legislation that limits the use of the tool in that manner.

Likewise if the free market is used as a way to reduce the availability of content, I can be against that while still supporting it as a guiding concept.

Joe Rogan being on Spotify is entirely about limiting the availability of his podcast. They're paying him to not make his episodes available outside of Spotify.

Not necessarily. He could have seen the writing on the wall with Google/YouTube and wanted a platform where he would not be censored ... and may have miscalculated.

People seem to forget that he had an ownership stake in the UFC, which sold for over 4 billion dollars. Also, an ownership stake in Onnit (cofounder), which sold for untold millions to Unilever. $100MM is a lot of money, but he was very, very wealthy before that deal. It's not like he was scraping by on Ramen noodles before Spotify came along.

1. Also "I signed a 100M deal" can be about more than just the money

It could be about fear (of being back at a place where he wanted food) It could be about legacy (he wants to give the money to children, family, whatever) It could be about money (I will have felt I’ve made it when I have a Yacht)…but he seems to be a smarter person than that. It could be about not ever having to work doing anything he doesn’t want to ever again. It could be about distributing is thoughts as far and wide as he can.

but just saying it was ‘ultimately a matter of money’ is a non-statement.

Spotify made him a tremendous offer.

As for whether or not reducing the availability of information is immoral, that obviously depends on what the information in question is. I’m unfamiliar with Joe Rogan’s work so I have no opinion on this particular case.

Edit: Based on the replies I wasn’t sufficiently clear. I don’t believe the Rogan deal is immoral because I have no belief about it’s morality or lack thereof at all. If you insist on a moral judgment that I feel ill-informed to make, then I’ll speculate that the deal probably was moral.

I'm all in favour of reducing copyright power/length, but outside of mandatory licensing there are very few circumstances where locking IP up would be outside the scope.

Rogan wanted to give control over his catalog in exchange for heaping gobs of money. He didn't have to do this if he didn't want to (he was already independently wealthy), but he did want to, so he did it, and was not harmed in any way.

That's literally the whole premise of things like copyright and patents. You can't just run out and start distributing NFL streams, copies of movies, or Disney labeled memorabilia without the expressed permission of the people who own that content.

Which are arguably a government-imposed regulatory capture whose disfunction causes the market to be less free. So, it sounds like the two of you kind of agree?

Imagine the destruction that would cause.

Then that's not the "free market" that you support, just "markets."

To clarify my argument, I mean for those reading this post to either push for that change in the dictionary (the usual way: by being more clear on their definition when sing it and encouraging others to use their definition and do the same), or to stop muddying the waters (and possibly use an updated term).

In a free market, the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government or other authority, and from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities

From this simple snippet, we can conclude three things:

- government and other authorities are only limited to not interfere with supply and demand; enforcing product standards does not make a market non-free

- good anti-monopoly legislation is an example of the government working towards the free market, not against it

- Anything involving copyright and patents is by definition not a free market

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market

Essentially IP protection is encouraging creation and innovation by preventing someone who didn’t do the work from simply stealing it and profiting without paying the creator. This is certainly over-simplified, but one way of viewing IP protections is that it’s trying to balance multiple freedoms, and that a free market with no regulation at all is not actually free for everyone. Having no protections on product standards is a loss of freedom for consumers. Having no protections on intellectual property is a loss of freedom for creators (and, the thinking goes, would be a net drain on the economy).

Here are some hastily googled arguments in favor of viewing IP protection as part of a free market:

https://www.aei.org/technology-and-innovation/intellectual-p...

https://cip2.gmu.edu/2013/11/14/copyright-is-still-essential...

Why’s that? I don’t follow. How does black markets being defined as illegal imply there are legal ones?

BTW, don’t take my word for it, just look it up.

“A black market, underground economy or shadow economy is a clandestine market or series of transactions that has some aspect of illegality or is characterized by some form of noncompliant behavior with an institutional set of rules. If the rule defines the set of goods and services whose production and distribution is prohibited by law, non-compliance with the rule constitutes a black market trade since the transaction itself is illegal.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_market

Your statement "black markets are not markets without legislation" logically implies such existence. I regard legislation as a governmental act and in my opinion you stretched its meaning to an informal agreement between market participants.

But, if you meant legislation as some kind of unwritten law, that breaks state laws, i would fully agree.

As a civil society matter, I think we should agree that making a secret album so that it ends up in the hands of a hedge fund criminal is uncool. It’s appropriate and even good for us to say that while that’s something allowed by the rules, we accord it no honor.

The tech didn’t exist at the time, but honestly wouldn’t it be better for the world if Wu-Tang had issued a single exclusive NFT of the album, and then made the actual music freely available?

I mean maybe not, maybe the songs actually suck, but I would certainly like to hear them.

Often artists like to make a statement with their art, and how an artwork is received is often as much a part of the statement as the artwork it self (think Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain). Wu-Tang Clan wanted to make a statement with their art and they did, quite successfully to be honest.

Often people incorporate art into their culture, and what the original artist intended with the artwork is only a small part of what it becomes. Society thrives by sharing art and has done so long before copyright existed, quite successfully to be honest.

However as it stands our current economy does mandate that artists make a living for them self, and while we still live in a world of 40 hour per week minimum wage where most people have little energy and time to work on art/hobby in spare time, artists selling their art with artificial scarcity follows logically.

All that being said, this is not what we were talking about with the Wu-Tang Clan record. Their piece was a unique piece that works as a commentary on how the rest of musicians distribute their art. I look at this more like a fine art piece (or even performance art piece) then music. A lot of fine artists incorporate music with their art pieces and nobody expects them to distribute it digitally (though many do). This is kind of like the reverse of that.

Finally, by allowing our artists this freedom of distribution, we get nice things, including a diverse and healthy art world.

It does not mandate that they need to make their living from a particular business model. You already mentioned patronage as a method of funding for art - crowdfunding is one natural extension of that. Performance also does not rely on artifical scarcity. Demand for new art does not rely on artificial scarcity. There is also nothing saying that artists need to make their living from their art - and in fact this is not something most artists can do even with society being burdened with artificial scarcity.

> and while we still live in a world of 40 hour per week minimum wage where most people have little energy and time to work on art/hobby in spare time

I don't think the 40 hour work week is something that should be reinforced in any way at all. If society can have people working full-time on art then there is no real need to keep this outdated model where everyone needs to dedicate a majority of their waking time to survival.

> artists selling their art with artificial scarcity follows logically.

An economy built around articial scarcity reinforces a need for artificial scarcity? Maybe, but not an argument for anything.

> All that being said, this is not what we were talking about with the Wu-Tang Clan record. Their piece was a unique piece that works as a commentary on how the rest of musicians distribute their art. I look at this more like a fine art piece (or even performance art piece) then music. A lot of fine artists incorporate music with their art pieces and nobody expects them to distribute it digitally (though many do). This is kind of like the reverse of that.

I have nothing against an artist only distributing their work to a single person if they want to do that for whatever reason - but I don't think that society should then help them in any way in ensuring that that art stays with only that recipient once it leaves their hands.

> Finally, by allowing our artists this freedom of distribution, we get nice things, including a diverse and healthy art world.

Hahaha no. We get art that is optimized for profitability which tends to work against diversity while almost all transformative creative endeavours are prevented - except when copyright is ignored, as it is with most UGC, game mods mods, youtube videos etc. where it is mostly the platforms profiting off that art and not the artists.

2. They wanted to sell an album like a piece of physical art. It isn't digital content and there's no digital version of it as far as I know.

I think that is probably not what Skreli wanted. The entire point seemed to be that no one else would get to hear the music. Otherwise, there's really not much difference between a single person owning the NFT or the gold master with the mp3 being freely distributed.

Are you against the concept of intellectual property as a whole?

https://youtu.be/tLwVvtL4mTI

These funds subscribe to and push a China style system in the USA, as evidenced by their leading role in pushing ESG. There is little good about this abuse of what’s mostly either pension fund money or fed stimulus money.

Blackstone through its Hipnosis subsidiary has spend tons of capital to buy up 50% of Neil Young and much of other music, books and audio book rights

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/cathyolson...

Blackrock, that also destroy single family ownership by buying up homes and is run by the same people, also hold a lot of Spotify stock.

Both the way they get they money they bully with and what they push is therefore anti free market.

In this system anything can be bought by those who control the money supply by inflating all assets, meaning you can't really own any property. So what we have is neither a free market nor capitalism.

Instead, I think many of us are arguing that Spotify shouldn’t exercise that option just because of an outraged online mob. That includes those of us that aren’t particular fans of Rogan and wouldn’t be affected if we couldn’t consume his content anymore. Many of us are arguing that as a general principal; don’t give in to a short-lived and irrational angry mob.

I am arguing for Spotify and other content distributors to ignore angry mobs because I worry that eventually such a mob will come for something I do value. E.g., I listen to plenty of music that includes gratuitous levels of profanity. I imagine that such music greatly offends many people, chiefly culturally conservative prudes. Should such an online mob form and demand Spotify stop distributing some of my favorite music then I hope Spotify resists that mob.

Maybe one day I’ll even be a member of such a mob demanding that some platform stop distributing something that offends my sensibilities. While my emotions of hate and outrage may cloud my rational judgment, I hope the platform will have the courage to tell me and my compatriots to pound sand. If we don’t like the content, then we don’t have to consume it.

*Edited to fix a mistake as pointed out in a reply.

The difference in me (chiefly culturally conservative prude) and the liberal cancel culture is that I won’t try to silence someone’s choices based on my values. You may listen to whatever you want and I hope you get enjoyment out of it. I support your freedoms and a lot of good men have died to protect them.

(Also this is only tangentially related but why is being prude a bad thing? I had a female friend in high school that would get insulted for being too prude. I don't think people really realize the way these concepts get applied in reality. People are allowed to be prude just as they're allowed to be libertines.)

There isn't? Are there not people calling for someone to be fired/resign because of some action they did?

Nobody’s calling the shots here… nobody went and decided “aim the twitter outrage cannon at Joe Rogan, he ran afoul of the Cancel Culture and must atone.” It’s just a phenomenon that happens due to the tendency of humans on social media to amplify outrage rather than ignore it.

The idea that nobody organizes to push around political muscle seems pretty naive, like suggesting that there are no guerilla ads on reddit.

It extends far beyond social media.

This is a great analogy.

Rupert Murdoch, on the other hand, has a history of running news at a loss to push his angle.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/jun/11/rupert-murdoch...

That's not my claim. I'm claiming that if you actually watch CNN, they tend to literally put a camera to a big computer monitor and show you a bunch of people's tweets. I'm not talking about bias/etc here, I'm talking about how they literally feature tweets as part of their news coverage.

Of the typical stories on CNN that one would qualify as "cancel culture", they typically go something like: "<Celebrity A> said a controversial thing on Twitter! Let's take a look at some of the reactions..." etc etc. Their coverage seems to be focused on "what do the people think of X", all the damned time. Yes, this makes CNN quite useless as a news organization.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/style/starbucks-gay-agend...

Nice try though pretending history starts at some arbitrary line you can then use to critique. Conservatives are just getting a taste of their own medicine.

Their American fanbase (yanno, the MASSIVE group of people that enabled the Dixie Chicks' success... it sure didn't come from European audiences) turned on them because their values were obviously different and I guess Natalie Maines couldn't grasp that.

I don't have any evidence, but I'm leaning towards thinking that the people calling for Joe Rogan's cancellation aren't his main fanbase. That's the common thread with today's "social liberal" influence on media- people that are complete non-consumers of whatever winds up in the crosshairs just go to fucking war nowadays against whatever they've decided is offensive.

Why on earth does this matter in any way?

> shit on their president

Uh, this is what they said:

> Just so you know, we're on the good side with y'all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we're ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.

Not exactly “shitting” on him is it?

Anecdotally, I think joe Rogan has lost a TON of fans over the last few years. There is no better example of this than the joe rogan subreddit. It used to be a place for fans to gather, but now he regularly gets roasted and fairly criticized. And if you’ve actually watched the JRE over the last few years, his podcast has changed SIGNIFICANTLY (for the worse imo). There’s no better example of this than the clip from 2020 that was circulating this week, where he basically calls antivaxxers bozos.

He used to have a kooky, interesting perspective and I appreciated how he would approach topics with an open mind. Even if I didn’t agree with his guests, he’d ask decent questions and confront the egregious shit. He doesn’t do that anymore. His guests are just people that believe the same fringe, unsupported contrarian conspiracies.

American main stream news distribute fake new very often, but I don't see much uproar about that in the cancel culture circles.

https://rumble.com/vtunof-the-media-outlets-demanding-joe-ro...

Glenn Greenwald made a good video about. Breaking Points, Kyle Kulinski and Tim Pool has talked about this issue. CNN, MSNBC, etc. can say outright lies and nobody wants them to be cancelled. Instead they are being promoted on Youtube. Does "Horse dewormer" ring a bell or "Russia gate"? Both of them are lies period.

The use of language in culture wars are fascinating, I really wish I studied deeply enough in the humanities to really grok it. To my laymen eyes, there are a lot of evolving shibboleths[1], and verbal (or mental) gymnastics to variably identify an activity subjectively based on where on the political spectrum the perpetrator (or poor victim). People are really insist the other side is completely unreasonable, and is to blame for engaging in the culture war.

1. e.g. cancel culture, BIPoC, woke-ism, gender pronouns, virtue-signaling, &tc

I wish people would have the integrity to speak about the situation honestly.

Discussions with conservatives on issues like this inevitably result in every topic being badly grafted and transposed into a discussion on "left-wing culture". The issue-at-hand is rarely, if ever, the point. Reading conservative commentary on this issue, one would believe that he was banned from Spotify for stating that he believed that small government was preferable to big government. It's completely and utterly fucking disingenuous.

None of the removed episodes were about COVID. Actually, only 1 removed episode is from the last 3 years.

It appears that they were deleted instead due to his use of racial slurs. Which, I guess, is a "gotcha".

With your regards to your second point, I do not know what you are referencing. This goes back to my earlier point. Are you saying that it's outrageous that Spotify would remove podcasts containing racial slurs? Or have you pushed aside the topic-at-hand to discuss some social issue outside of this topic?

Now,

- venture into messing with kids

- screwing with public health

- racism

and ... what were you going to stand on? the serious respect you plowed being the "in guy" for the last 15 mins of fame talking BS? Nobody cares that much. I don't. You're in decline now or out. There's a built in and pre-understood fungibility to the whole business, which puts a smile on my face.

Whether it's Trump, the I-man, or Howard stern a lot of media people like them b/c the bring in viewers. And they are the first to toss them out when the line is crossed. I think Imus (I-man) of "Imus in the morning" learned that in a direct way. So let's not totally dismiss the platform behind the host even if Spotify is OK here.

I'm sure Spotify are under colossal pressure to delete historical perceived heretical 'content' on their platform in order to keep their paying customers calm during an unprecedented era of US anti free A1 speech and hysterical media driven witch hunts.

I also think their long term prospects, as societal fashions change and (I hope) reason prevails, will not be good as they will be associated with a very dark period in history. IBM survived this after WWII but it took a lot of PR and having the media on their side.

Agree that hopefully Spotify can resist calls to stop distributing content that other users find objectionable. As you point out, fashion will change and hopefully it does so in a way that shuns calls for censorship.

I’m welcome to say Spotify shouldn’t “censor” (in the corporate media sense) certain speakers.

And I can cancel/encourage others to cancel their Spotify subscriptions.

And I can keep on using Spotify, but let them know I don’t like their conduct, even though it doesn’t (YET!) make me unsubscribe.

All free market.

The end result is that a content distribution platform will have to curate a specific brand that targets specific consumers and only distributes conforming content. Whereas we currently have a half dozen or so music streaming services that all have roughly the same content, we’ll soon find content fragmented across 20 different platforms; each corresponding to a specific slice of consumer preferences. Many of us will have to subscribe to multiple services to get the content we seek and will not be able to mix content. E.g., many of my current playlists on Spotify would be split across several disjoint streaming platforms.

Instead, I think platforms should never be reactive in calls for dropping content. Instead they should have a general principle of broadly distributing all but the most extreme fringe content. They can regularly update their principles used in determining what content they distribute, but that should never be done as a quick reaction to some mob. Otherwise they’ll constantly be facing a series of outraged customers that want the platform to stop distributing some content that those outraged user’s don’t even consume. And I believe that will only result in platform fragmentation as distributors curate a brand around specific segments of consumers.

Historically the press has dealt with this problem by taking a “lowest common denominator” approach to morality. Extreme prudishness.

For example, the infamous Hayes Code was intended to help movie producers deal with the fact that almost every American city had (different!) laws on what a movie could show.

That’s not ideal, or even an option.

For example, if Spotify stops paying Joe Rogan, they are unlikely to remain exclusive. Another example is that they may not have rights to remove episodes, or refuse to air episodes without loosing exclusivity or paying a penalty.

My point is that we don't know what the other terms are of the contract are.

> Whereas we currently have a half dozen or so music streaming services that all have roughly the same content, we’ll soon find content fragmented across 20 different platforms; each corresponding to a specific slice of consumer preferences. Many of us will have to subscribe to multiple services to get the content we seek and will not be able to mix content. E.g., many of my current playlists on Spotify would be split across several disjoint streaming platforms.

Where else can you get Joe Rogan's podcast, today?

Nowhere. That's fragmentation. Spotify literally signed the contract explicitly for this reason. So it doesn't make sense to start worrying about different content being available on different platforms now that people are removing their music in protest, rather than two years ago when they made his podcast exclusive in the first place.

Sure things are fragmented today, but that doesn't mean it cant be much worse. Today, most of the big catalogs have a ton of overlap. Exclusivity isn't the norm. If artists and services start drawing up into political camps, this overlap could significantly decrease.

Also, you are making wild assumptions about the contract between Joe Rogan and Spotify. Maybe there's a clause in there that they will not only license his shows, but also make them available to their users? In that case, removing the episodes would be a breach of contract.

I hope you understand a little better now.

Which hey, I get. But they are refusing to publish it because they don’t want to be associated with it anymore, and they bought exclusive rights to it from producer, so…

And I don’t see Joe Rogan saying he is in a hurry to return the money Spotify gave him for this exclusive licensing deal either.

The only real way I can think to ‘solve’ that problem would be to make it illegal to do exclusive licensing deals for content.

Which I personally would be behind (it is also at the root of the whole streaming provider wars, among many many others), but has very far reaching consequences intellectual property wise.

Intellectual property law has always had an element of ‘society gives you these protections with the idea and understanding that it makes EVERYONE wealthier in the long run’. There is no NATURAL RIGHT (as in, something that will happen unless interfered with) to exclusive anything related to knowledge.

If anything, it requires extraordinary work and legal protections for it to be even a potential thing, and that is becoming more and more the case.

To get that protection from Society (without it just being a naked theft from everyone anyway), there should be some exchange or actual improvement for the rest of society.

Saying that at a minimum if you have exclusive rights to sell or distribute something, you must be selling or distributing it at a rate that allows normal people to access it (there is the tough part - how do you define that!) or you lose exclusivity and anyone can distribute copies for free - seems perfectly fair.

It also encourages archiving and retention of our history, which would be a good sell for overall society I imagine.

- this basically means no one has any IP right to stop information being distributed at all. So if someone say writes a book, then is later embarrassed by it, they couldn’t stop people from publishing it. They currently can.

- this means highly valuable IP (source code to your secret search engine backend?) is very difficult to control. It would also probably apply to things like manufacturing howtos, blueprints, etc.

- Even if you say ‘distributed’ means publicly viewed, this probably impacts distributed/licensed software in various ways, and some of these others. If someone is able to open it in a hex editor that is certainly going to count as ‘viewable’. If they can do that without signing an NDA (which would probably be impacted by this too?), or going through a gate and doing it at your secure facility, that probably counts as ‘public’ too.

- so then there is no way to stop someone else from distributing your now deprecated software? Potentially for a fee?

How is this unethical?

No it's not, because free speech does not equal the right to be heard.

> I find it unethical to suppress someone's ability to freely voice their opinions

Can you really not come up with a single example of when you feel a group, entity, corporation, whatever has any right to remove a person from their platform or premise because of what they are saying? Really? This is "unethical", categorically?

The principle of “don’t interfere with the free exchange of ideas” is one such example where it is particularly hard to see the justification. The consequences of speech suppression are usually subtle —- how do you quantify the impact of a conversation that didn't happen? And at the same time, the consequences of allowing hatespeech or misinformation are usually not subtle, but rather immediate and relatively obvious.

I think we’re actually lucky because the Joe Rohan example does contain examples of good justifications. For the past two years, Rogan was openly discussing politically inconvenient inconsistencies, contradictions, and in some cases retroactively apparent lies by the establishment. It is good to know when your leaders are incompetent, when they are lying, or even when they have made a mistake and never taken responsibility for it! It is good that these conversations happened and good that people know this information.

But even if we can see that this is good, it’s still one of those abstract good-for-society things that is hard to quantify and hard to weigh against the consequences of its counterfactual non-existence. It is thus almost impossible to balance against the harms of, for example, supporting vaccine skepticism. But that’s not an argument for suppression, merely an acknowledgement that this is hard to think about clearly.

But it is a fallacy to say: Joe Rogan’s vaccine skepticism is getting people killed, therefor he should be silenced. The reason is that living in the sort of society that would silence Joe Rogan also gets people killed. The deaths are just abstract deaths.

Put it this way: image we get into a war in five years because Rogan and all the other independent voices like him have been successfully soft-pressured into not talking about the downsides, while the mainstream propaganda mouthpieces have been selling the war hard. Thus, we create a concrete terrible outcome because we allowed a culture of speech suppression. Unfortunately, even if that does happen, it will not be obvious that speech suppression led to war, because, again, general principles tend to have more subtle but far-reaching consequences.

There are also well-known edge cases where speech suppression is probably obviously the right thing to do. I personally think that the genome for smallpox should never have been published, because try as I might, I can’t imagine a scenario where the harms of suppressing the specific knowledge outweighs the possible (even likely) consequence of its dispersement. You can have a principle while being cognizant that tradeoffs can be valid.

Again, though, the reason why free expression is weirdly difficult to defend, is that the harms of “bad” free expression are usually immediate and clear, while the harms of speech suppression are abstract and distant.

> The deaths are just abstract deaths.

False. At least 5.7 million actual people have died from Covid. Probably many more. Your counter is abstract and somewhat straw man, while the pandemic is a fairly specific and real public health crisis that more or less all public health experts agree requires active management.

Though now that I think on it, there was suppression of anti-Iraq-war speech in the early 2000s. Maybe if those perspectives had been more widely heard, that war wouldn’t have happened.

In any case, what you do in your last paragraph is merely an example of the thing I’m talking about. Misunderstanding someone’s argument and calling that misunderstanding a strawman is itself a strawman. 5.7 million deaths on one side of the ledger, okay. Well, the establishment was wrong about masking early in the pandemic, so how many more lives would have been lost if pro-masking voices had been suppressed then?

You seemed to defend and frame Rogan’s speech as if it was part of a beneficial citizenry probing corrupt government officials, and it seems like you downplayed the potential harm of spreading vaccine misinformation as being balanced out by the abstract harm of censorship.

To put it succinctly, you think I’m minimizing the harm of vaccine misinformation, and I suspect you’re minimizing the probable harms of normalizing speech suppression, and maybe we’re both somewhat right about the other.

They probably did the calculus and determined they’d lose LESS people if they scrubbed the catalog than if they didn’t. It’s not a political statement to them.

I dont understand how you can come to that conclusion. eg A doctor saving the life of a white supremacist.

Ethics are differentiated by profession. It is not altigether clear, which ethical considerations Spotify is bound by and apply to this situation.

I do not. That assertion is unrelated to the topic, so Im not sure why you imagined it.

To be clear, I have implied the consequences are equal or, worse, probably multiplicative...in the context of the theoretical consideration you posited.

> It's unethical to publish content that promotes white supremacists

Again, how does this relate to any ethics that applies to Spotify?

So at this point what matters is that Spotify made a deal with Joe Rogan, and thus Spotify is also responsible for whatever he fancies to broadcast.

As the only way to vote in this matter is my wallet, I considered cancelling the subscription. If I did I would also try to convince other people to do the same.

And frankly, Spotify was a better service without podcasts.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/michelle-shock...

I'm not here to defend Joe Rogan, I just think it's stupid to get drawn into Internet fights between celebrities. Most of it is kayfabe anyway.

First of all, WHO ARE YOU ARGUING WITH?!? - "proponent of a free market"? Who are you talking to? Critics of these reactions are not these people, so why on earth are you pretending you want to have a discussion when you deliberately choose to argue with people that have no objection to them? You're talking to an audience of three people, yet everybody that's on your side, the side of censorship will pretend you're refuting the opposing perspective. No, you just picked a tiny group that already agrees with you, pretend it doesn't, and then explain why they actually agree with you.

Ok, so it seems like you're fine with it, because Spotify is a "private corporation", aren't you? Is Spotify free to ban all black artists then? They are a private company after all. Or is that different for reason x / y / z. Fine, let's be a little more theoretical than. Youtube, Spotify and Twitter decide to ban ALL opinions that go against invading Venezuala. Is that something you will support? Private company banning an opinion which they disagree with, all fine and dandy, correct?

Top comment, most upvotes and everyone joins in on this farce... wtf is going on here?

- Discriminating artists across the board based on ethnicity

- Social networks banning end-users for having an opinion

Neither of these are in any way similar to selling your intellectual property to a third party and them deciding whether or not to air it. If you additionally enter an NDA with this party, voluntarily and through compensation, that is in no way anything like discrimination based on ethnicity, or blanket censorship on social media.

Why are you pretending this is a difficult issue to understand, it very clearly isn't. You're making up random assertions that fit your own predetermined perspective. Everybody that makes money on Youtube or Twitter or Spotify agreed to certain terms. And these terms say they can be deplatformed. So yes, the artist getting displaced based on ethnicity and the anti-war opinion getting banned is exactly the same thing. And it seems you think this is justifiable as long as a spread sheet says it's profitable to do so.

I'm not opening a discussion here, there is nothing to discuss. I'm simply following your own logic to it's conclusion. Your input is not necessary in any of this.

Maybe it would be different if you said "as a supporter of the free market, I believe that Spotify was correct and in their rights to do this".

Perhaps they have other principles too, not just the free market as the be-all end-all.

Not to mention that this isn't the free market operating freely -- it's corporations being told what to do by pressure groups (as opposed to customers of those corporations voting with their wallets, e.g. by not listening to Rogan).

I downloaded all my playlists from Spotify and will move to any other streaming service I want to (one which has Neil Young—whom I enjoy).

Who are these “pressure groups?” Are they individual musicians and customers? When do individuals morph into these straw men?

I suspect it's due to investors realizing the fragility of Spotify's business model - thanks to some (high profile? ish?) artists abandoning them at the drop of the hat - and selling their stocks, resulting in a huge drop in market value. The company has already been steadily and significantly loosing value for the last year, so it probably didn't take much to convince a lot of investors to bail.

Q Sure. Last week, the Surgeon General also was asked on MSNBC about Joe Rogan’s vaccine comments on Spotify. And he said that tech companies have an “important role to play” in stopping misinformation because he — they are the “predominant places” where misinformation spreads.

Spotify is putting out advisory warnings on episodes that have to do with COVID-19. Does the White House and the administration think this is a satisfactory step? Or do you — do you think that companies like Spotify should go further than just, you know, putting a label on there to say, “Hey, go do your own — you know, check this out. You know, there’s more research you can look at — you know, scientific research regarding COVID”?

MS. PSAKI: Sure. Well, last July, I — you probably know, but the Surgeon General also took the unprecedented step to issue an advisory on the risk of misinformation and public health, which is a very significant step. And amid that, he talked about the role social media platforms have.

So our hope is that all major tech platforms — and all major news sources, for that matter — be responsible and be vigilant to ensure the American people have access to accurate information on something as significant as COVID-19. And that certainly includes Spotifly [sic].

So, this disclaimer — it’s a positive step. But we want every platform to continue doing more to call out misinform- — mis- and disinformation while also uplifting accurate information.

I mean, look at the facts, right? You are 16 times more likely to be hospitalized if you’re unvaccinated and 68 times more likely to die than someone who is boosted if you’re unvaccinated. That’s pretty significant.

"So, this disclaimer — it’s a positive step. But we want every platform to continue doing more to call out misinform- — mis- and disinformation while also uplifting accurate information."

That's not saying they should be taken down, she says "do more to call out misinformation".

I don't think people left Spotify because of Joe Rogan, not in any real numbers anyway (and we can see that next they publish their user statistics). It's a few pundits and musicians making a negative publicity fuss...

>Who are these “pressure groups?” Are they individual musicians and customers? When do individuals morph into these straw men?

You could have written: "I don't believe there are pressure groups involved, just individual musicians and customers". Instead, you opted to insinuate that I disingenuously created some "straw men" (and thus, am not to be trusted, or whatever). How about the principle of charity, and just making your case, instead on shitting on the person you're discussing with?

There were never just some individuals and musicians, but also major media calling for cancelling the show again and again, group petitions such as:

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/covid-misi...

and even White House statements addressing the JR issue.

> It's a few [...] musicians making a negative publicity fuss

One thing I'd like to add on this point is that this kind of negative publicity fuss, raised by musicians, can be incredibly powerful. If you aren't familiar with the work and impact of Neil Young, especially songs like "Southern Man" and "Alabama," I encourage you to consider his work.

His music likely opened some eyes in the 70s while the American South was still gripped in racist fervor (as someone who grew up in the south, I too was impacted by these songs when I encountered them in the early 2000s). Musicians have the power to influence public opinion. That public opinion is influenced by them does not imply that all influence is the result of a greater agenda.

What I find hilarious is the number of folks of a, certain political persuasion (the fact a public health issue is politicized is absolutely nuts), have deemed Neil Young and Joni Mitchell as irrelevant dinosaurs from an artistic perspective. Some even going so far as to say their historical importance is of a mere footnote.

Of course the firestorm their actions caused in the public discourse on this issue has shown their voice matters quite a bit.

Media pundits and organizations can always blow up and enlarge the issues raised by some artists that they agree with to further a cause they'd advocate for anyway.

Doesnt mean the artists are relevant in 2022 pop culture - or that if they had said something different (with no eager pundits to push it) they would been also listened to.

In fact, Neil Young for one, has been laughed at (by the same media) several times in past 1-2 decades, for his "out of touch" tirades against compressed musid, his bizarro Pono music player business, and so on.

Pressure groups can be organic too.

They just aren't just "individuals" -- and their influence is not the same as consumer choice to listen or not to the podcast (and thus relegate it to unprofitable).

When do their actions, in your eyes, cease to be ordinary "vote with your wallet" market interaction?

Doesn't the act organization itself change it from a "vote with your wallet" (as an independent customer) to propagandizing and promoting your ideas to others on what they should buy?

When it comes to companies working like that, people call it a "cartel".

Also, isn't there a difference between movement organized and advocated "don't buy Spotify" versus group dictated Spotify what to sell?

In the second case Spotify caved because of the pressure/threat, not because the product wasn't selling.

It might still be a market decision (in the sense of it being an economic consideration of Spotify's behalf, as the ultimate threat was to their image and ultimately bottom line) but it wasn't a free market decision as in consumers signalling worth of a product with their purchases or lack thereof.

Like, what exactly is it do you think they are coordinating, other than individually choosing to vote with their wallets for similar reasons?

>It might still be a market decision (in the sense of it being an economic consideration of Spotify's behalf, as the ultimate threat was to their image and ultimately bottom line) but it wasn't a free market decision

What you're describing, making business decisions based on weighing the economic costs of losing customers vs. the economic benefits of keeping the content, is indeed a free market decision. The fact that there are no options that make everybody happy doesn't negate that.

Which I think you can argue is a problem (to the original question). Dragging company execs to testify in front of congress about misinformation and then framing any (in)action as monopolistic (during a time of anti-trust inquires) isn't exactly "free market" either. I'm not convinced that influence has fundamentally changed the outcome in the past year but it seems a bit naive to think the government has no influence in these moderation decisions. It's not hard to imagine an example where this would be less defensible; "WH strong disapproves of these 'powerful' tech companies amplifying content that contains misinformation about our justifications to invade Iraq".

That’s pretty different than how you portrayed it.

Aren’t artists and content creators Spotify customers, too? They use Spotify’s platform to sell and distribute their content. We consider both the buyer and the seller to be customers of eBay. We consider both the app user and the app developer to be customers of Apple. Why do you not also consider the content creators customers “voting with their wallet” in this situation?

In this case, Spotify is staring down the barrel of a well-organized boycott from both customers and content providers who may (or may not) sign contracts to let Spotify use their music, podcasts, etc.

How is it “voting with your wallet” if you’re still giving them money every month?

There is something deeply wrong with destroying things that haven't yet reached their natural end or not letting them grow, even if one is legally entitled to.

It might not be quite as wrong or bad as, say, state-sponsored blanket censorship, but I think we should call it what it is.

A work was available and now it's not. The only reason being that an entity decided that it should be removed from view. Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information[0].

Here, information has been suppressed, thus, censored.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship

Now anyone who receives an offer like this from Spotify will have to consider the possibility of having their brand censored. This will either drive up the cost to Spotify or simply make content providers refuse all together. So, unless Spotify has decided to quit this business plan, I don’t think this is a good long-term solution.

I do think what happened is Spotify saw its DAUs and subscribers dipping, and after the bloodbath in $FB stock last week, got freaked out and abandoned a long-term business plan to prevent a dip in users this quarter.

Uh, plainly you do. The commenter's main point was that what the broadcaster did was not censorship (and whoever calls it that "need a reality check"). You're saying it "still is in my book". What much more different can the two of you be on this issue?

Part of the reason for the disconnect here probably lies in the fact that the definition given in the WP is overly broad and vague. The way the term is usually used, it strongly suggests some outside party, typically an authoritative body like a government, intervening to say "you cannot publish this". Basically, there needs to be some element of outside coercion for the term "censorship", or even "self-censorship" to apply.

And no -- the weight of public opinion does not constitute "coercion" in this context.

That's why when a company wakes up and realizes "gee, it turns out publishing endless amounts inflammatory crap that does not contribute to discourse and with essentially no artistic value is actually not so good for our overall image and business model" -- that's not what the term "censorship" was is really meant for.

I just think we need to be able to say hey, this is censorship, and it's not necessarily wrong because of XYZ reasons and it's fine and above-board. Spotify's got the rights to the show and nobody can or should be able to compel them to broadcast something they don't want to.

However, pointing to a nebulous category of "proper censorship" (which sounds like pretty much exactly the same thing, just perpetrated by a state actor instead of a private corp) as a way to invalidate the use of the word "censorship" in this context seems dishonest. Not to mention that it strikes me as odd to refer to some instances of censorship as "proper" compared to others.

Let's go along with the "proper censorship" narrative and put on the tinfoil hat for a moment. It would be easy for a sufficiently motivated state actor to create or compel a private company to acquire the rights to works that they want censored, and then simply use the private entity as a front to carry out the censorship on the government's behalf.

I'm not implying that's happening here, but we need to recognize that mostly anything is possible.

If I'm entirely unable to access a work today that was freely available yesterday, it has been censored. The devil's in the details, but the semantics and results here are very clear.

I would argue: "No - either the supermarket, or Coca-Cola decided it wasn't selling very well."

In case you're too young to remember New Coke -- and how its sudden removal was so traumatic for an entire generation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke

I hate to say this is a strawman because claiming logical fallacy is overused in Internet discourse, but that's what your comment feels like. Along with some ageism sprinkled in as an afterthought.

Of course censorship is not applicable to a physical product. I have only referred to the censorship of "speech, public communication, or other information."

Sorry, I don't get where you are going with this at all.

"If your local 7-Eleven had Oui and Hustler on its racks last week, but they are gone this week, it has been censored."

I would argue: "No - 7-Eleven either decided just those titles weren't selling all at that well. On top of generating negative press, and driving away families with children."

In reality there is political risk for highly public decisions. Politicians do have power. They can call you before Congress under oath without any evidence of legal wrongdoing by anyone. They can start costly antitrust investigations. They can start costly audits. Anywhere along the way, if you make the slightest misstep (or even if you don't), they accuse you of perjury or lying to a federal official or obstruction of justice. Or maybe they just don't "protect" you as well as they might from various unfortunate events.

Moreover, there's a pattern of governments harnessing the power of private companies to various purposes through this kind of coercion. If you are a CEO with a comfortable life do you really want to test the ideal that it can't happen in the U.S.?

I don't know if this is your opinion or not, but in general, this argument might hold more water if "activists" weren't gleefully trying to shut down relatively free-speech sites like Gab and Parler and others.

You can't have it both ways and claim that business can allow whatever content they want and then try and shut down businesses who do just that.

It's very clear where the bias lies. I am worried.

It’s really painful to see people draw moral and ethical lines over episodes of a guy bullshitting into a microphone being removed. It’d be nice if your ire and indignation were directed at an issue that would objectively improve the world, like exploitation of children, food inequality and starvation, the actual horrors of tech instead of the ones you’ve attached to, or anything but the plight a millionaire making yet more millions to talk out loud.

Look, for example, at the way that the Indian government used to strong-arm Twitter into obedience.

The free expression of ideas is more important than what you listed here. And see if you can figure out why it is directly related to said issues.

CNN just hired a guy that made book about fake Saddam Hussein and Al-qaeda connection.

CNN and others where saying Irak has WDM. That's proved to be a bold faced lie. Nobody is asking them to be banned in the cancel culture circles.

It's weird that one podcast host can be the root of evil, but selling a WAR with fake lies is nothing.

EDIT: WAR definitely kills people

The cognitive dissonance is startling.

Much like your original comment, and it doesn’t change that you targeted a political side that you blatantly disagree with. Your statement would be better made without the needless political slant, which as I point out, the other side have done it far more egregiously and in public institutions, such as libraries and schools.

To call this ‘censorship’ I believe is wrong:

1. It’s scientifically proven to be false. Misinformation, be it intended or otherwise brings its own moral and ethical issues.

2. Private companies have the right to choose what they publish/sell on their platform. Preventing them from doing so is also a suppression of free speech.

3. Everyone has a right to an opinion, and to voice that opinion. No-one has an inalienable right to have that opinion published, agreed with or disseminated by any platform they choose.

If anyone has taken choice away, it’s Rogan. Rogan chose to sell exclusivity to his catalog for a very handsome some. Along with that, he chose to forgo certain rights - one being which podcasts Spotify choose to make available.

And yes, I'm feeling a bit baited that I even bothered responding to your throwaway troll bullshit.

That’s kind of hard to believe when you brought up “leftists” when no one had discussed political associations

One can dispute and critique their own "team". As a matter of fact the inability to self critique is what lead us to this current state of unnecessary tribalism.

If I consider myself "left" I should still be able to criticize the "left". The problem is the mob cancels anyone critical so we're now eating ourselves alive and pushing away anyone that does not toe the party line verbatim. That's a great way to send teammates to another team.

And...most people on the left do that. A lot.

> The problem is the mob cancels anyone critical

“Cancels” is just bullshit. Virtually every person that has supposedly been “cancelled” still has a prominent platform and large and devoted audience; what they've done is been criticized and lost some audience and goodwill because certain of their ideas have competed poorly in the marketplace of ideas.

> That's a great way to send teammates to another team.

Just because you consider yourself on someone else's “team” doesn't mean they see you that way, and just because you see yourself as, e.g., “left”, doesn't mean everyone else on the “left” is part of the same team.

Anarchists and Libertarian Socialists see themselves as on the “left”.

Lenin-/Stalin-/Maoists see themselves as on the “left”.

They aren’t, even approximately, the same team.

And neither is the same team as, say, Social Democrats or Democratic Socialists, also on the “left”, though sometimes people in those groups may have a temporary, transitory, tactical alignment of interests.

I think by definition you can’t define/identify a side, and then place yourself in opposition to them and not be on a team? You may not have been on a team prior to the issue coming up or you might only be on the team temporarily for that issue, but it’s still two sides and you picked one, right?

I believe the core issue here is: while the first amendment applies to government, it is something that businesses should try to make a core part of their ethos. The censorship that tech companies have been doing are really against free speech and freedom of association.

Yes, companies are within their legal right to do the censorship we are seeing. That doesn't mean it's right.

C'mon, you know these claimants only mean "I want a free market for me".

This is a larger cultural question and will determine where we go from here.

Are we still a society that values free expression and open debate?

We have these media trolls just spewing provocative nonsense, finding any open wound in our discourse and throw salt on it so they can have their lols, dollars, and influence. How can you be surprise when free speech is finding it's boundaries.

This is not even a partisan thing, I do believe exploitative media that feeds on strife is very good business and thus it finds its audience, whether it's left or right. Catering to the different psychologies and fears while maximizing profits.

Not entirely correct, it is a licensing deal, with exclusivity to Spotify. JR is still the owner of the IP, however, it can only be distributed through Spotify.

But your point still stands, Spotify chooses what they will distribute, which is okay.

My only gripe, in this whole Spotify/Rogan saga, is with the mainstream media that sees Rogan as a threat to their business model so they try to slander him for miss-information, while being greater purveyors of miss-information themselves.

JR is deceptive not because every spoken word he says taken in isolation is false, but because the way he frames and presents various sources leads listeners to draw false conclusions. Taking everything he says at face value is no more valid that taking a joke at face value. TL;DR: - "just asking questions" is deceptive; that's not a valid way to learn nor inform. We could discuss in depth how it's deceptive, but that's not really the point - the point is that not all questions will be interpreted literally, so you need to do the same when judging how reasonable that communication is. You have to look holistically at the message listeners will hear.

That is an understatement.

> JR is deceptive not because everything he says taken in isolation is false

I understand at what you are getting at, words at face value don't mean much, context is everything. However, listening to JR I never get a feeling that I'm being intentionally deceived.

The falsehoods he believes seem to me to be a genuine lack of awareness on his parts, the fact that he changes opinions when confronted with the fact what he said was bullshit gives me trust that he is not out to deceive me.

If he's framing X doctor as best in the field because of Y achievements is because the average Joe would also believe that as well. And the fact that he has corrected some statements made by the past two controversial guests, regarding Covid, is the reason why I trust he's not deceiving with some agenda. Unlike with most mainstream media where I am always trying to figure out the underlying agenda of every statement made from the hosts.

As to an agenda: he has clear monetary and reputational motives for coming up with controversial guests and perspectives. People _like_ acquiring followers, and he's even being paid to do so. There's no need for anything as crude as an outright payment by some snake-oil salesperson to cause a conflict of interest, fame and fortune are quite he incentives by themselves - and here too, people can convince themselves they're onto something (and do so entirely honestly!) when they get this kind of positive feedback - even if it's nonsense.

If you believe that Joe's motives are any more pure than those of mainstream-media hosts, you're wearing rose-tinted glasses. Also, he is a mainstream media host. He's just a deceptive one, that's all. If anything, most mainstream media hosts have _fewer_ incentives to lie; after all, they tend not to simultaneously be media owners nor to rake in quite as much cash as he does, though surely there are exceptions. Also, the mere fact that other media tends to involve a much greater back-office makes it slightly harder to go off the deep end - your colleagues may sometimes say things to burst your (potentially honest) self-deceptive bubble.

2. On a rather related front: what do you think is the key differentiating factor that explains why humans (homo sapiens) have so devastatingly outstripped all ecological competitors?

My personal answer to question 2 explains why I have my doubts about all too rigidly accepting your moral thesis here. I mean, I accept and support the idea that honest debate can help surface tricky truths - and that in that context debate must be free, but not that all speech should be promoted unconditionally. That's harmful, and the only reason we're even talking about that is because as a society we've come to see the first amendment not merely as a tool to constrain an overly powerful, potentially abusive government, but as an axiom of patriotic identity. The first amendment is not perfect, and even if it were, it should not be applied blindly to every situation, nor should it replace all other social norms about honesty and truth.

But even if your perspective differs - I don't expect everyone to follow my lead, of couse - I don't think you're going to understand my reasoning without at least trying to understand and answer that question. In essence - your assertion that it's (implicitly unconditionally) "very healthy to have an enquiring mind" is backed by an assumption I do not share. I know that there are conditions here, and Rogan isn't satisfying those. And the heart of that disagreement is behind question 2.

Also, you don't think that having an enquiring mind is good? How do you justify that? And what is the assumption I made that you don't share?

TL;DR: People enjoy Joe Rogan because he's having simple conversations without pretending to have all the answers. Meanwhile the entire MSM, from Rachel Maddow to James Clapper has deliberately lied to their audience to push for wars and escalations. If you want to start cancelling, start there.

TLDR: That a message has context is an inescapable fact of life; but using context to deceive isn't.

It's amazing how people don't get cognitive dissonance over this disingenuous song and dance. The people lauding the choice of private companies to operate as they please when they deplatform are the very people pressuring private companies to deplatform people they don't like in the first place. If you were genuinely in favor of private companies operating as they see fit, you wouldn't feel motivated to pressure them to drop content you don't like.

>What Spotify chooses to do with it is completely up to them

What we don't like is that is it not left "up to them" what to do with their content. The point of the free market is that individuals are left to act independently in their own interests. This ideal is undermined when groups create pressure to deplatform or pull content.

Platforms are contracted by their users, they are not simply homeowners with private property. Too many companies these days get away with code and content changes without proper accountability, and things are regularly hidden to cover tracks... It's making the Internet very toxic now, and the blanket statements don't apply any more, people should always be held accountable for what they do and say in the course of making money at all levels, that's the only real thing protecting us from becoming slaves to corporate interests.

Not this dispute, per se, but I do advocate for a legislative solution to this whole situation: break them up. Recently posted to HN: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/mergers-ruin-everything

Not everyone who supports free markets is a market fundamentalist. It is not hard to understand that people may support free markets for most goods but oppose them for healthcare, education, senate seats and slaves. Do you really have a hard time understanding that?

>Exactly what he sold (NDA, limitations on his speech in his free time etc.) we'll probably never know, but whoever calls this "censorship" needs a reality check.

Censorship is the suppression of information. You may consider it good, you may consider it bad; it may be done by public institutions, it may be done by private institutions. NDAs are literally a form of censorship. I am not sure what you even mean by censorship if you think that isn't censorship.

Now, if I can't say "cucumber" at all, in any context, whether I entered in any agreement or not - thats censorship.

Very very few people are consistent in their views about privacy, freedom, or property rights. Politics is mostly a football game and the refs are only right when they call it in favor of your team.

Example - A news station refusing to publish stories that involves their parent or a sibling company is a common one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_censorship Religious censorship is another well understood form.

If you're saying "political censorship" is the only form of censorship that matters - it's debatable in the same way flat earth arguments are debatable.

This does involve the government though. They literally called on Spotify to censor Rogan.

As a proponent of Net Neutrality, I recognize that there are instances where corporations should not have the last say in any matter.

A free market with unbounded rights for corporations is not a good idea.

Since when did the term net neutrality change from meaning "a free and open internet on equal terms" to "expropriating platforms that refuse to show things I want to see"?

People support the free market because they like freedom. People conspiring to deplatform legal content cuts against that freedom. And they see arguments like this one as rhetorical tricks to get them to disarm and be colonized.

This is just the GPL vs. BSD wars all over again, with people claiming that freedom only means BSD-style and not worrying about the freedom-preserving aspects of the GPL and that if you're pro-GPL you're anti-freedom.

But there is a cultural question that I think this defense sidesteps a bit. I'd frame it as a question.

What level of heterodox opinion would you encourage Spotify (and the like) to tolerate? What opinion would be heterodox to you or your peers that you'd want to see Spotify to defend as the realm of reasonable on a platform of broad interest to the general public?

Draw the line where people spread lies or harass others so that actual harm gets done in the real world. Alex Jones got deplatformed after some of his fans were threatening grieving Sand Hooks families. Joe Rogans episodes were removed after they spread misinformation that convinces people to not get vaccinated in the middle of a pandemic, which will probably cause some deaths given how many people listen to his content.

Consider in the summer of 2020 there was a popular social movement that had quite a presence on social media that was spreading incorrect and ultimately very harmful statistics about police violence.

Arguably, this led to wide spread riots, large scale property destruction in multiple cities and ultimately an increase in crime. I think if a vocal minority bullied large corporations to effectively deplatform those social justice organizations then I think many people would be playing a different tune.

I agree with you that in reality there would be bigger backlash if this was applied to the left than the right.

Do some research first.

1. The private corporation “decided” it wanted to broadcast JRE

2. X happened

3. Private corporation decided it didn’t want to broadcast some JRE episodes

People are interested to in what X is

There’s also a step 0, which is the private corporation predicting it would make a lot of money if it could exclusively broadcast Joe Rogan.

Have people not seen this? I don't understand all the meta conversation about free markets when this is cut and dry 1A violation.

https://news.yahoo.com/white-house-urges-spotify-further-202...

Rather, you believe the action was because the white house said generally that they could do more. Like, that vague statement which didn't even mention episode removal, forced Spotify to do this, not the money.

That hypothesis seems unlikely.

That the company can draw from other potential motivations to justify that action is irrelevant to 1A.

No, they didn't. This is false.

>That the company can draw from other potential motivations to justify that action is irrelevant to 1A.

That you don't personally believe the actual reason they did this to be relevant is itself irrelevant.

There are far more interesting issues at hand and if you pretend this is a discussion about the legalities of this behaviour instead of a question about where idiotic self-harming nonsense like this leads our society you're being deliberately obtuse.

Anyway, I'm not pretending anything; I'm just answering GP's question.

You don't understand why someone would want to have all episodes of their favourite podcast available in one place? Just because someone supports the free market doesn't mean they don't have preferences. Support of the free market just means that one wants buyers and sellers to be able to transact without coercion, it doesn't imply any specific opinion about the practices of a company.

I don't like bad products and don't want companies to do stuff like this. I don't particularly care about Joe Rogan, but I've had a hell of a time finding episodes of various TV shows that have had episodes removed (Community, South Park, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) from services, and eventually I just end up pirating that episode.

I don't think what Spotify's doing should be illegal but that doesn't mean I have to like it or that I can't say they're making their product worse.

If you are referring to people who want Spotify to be forced to do things by law, like keep episodes up (which would be bizarre), then I'm against that too.

I understand that perfectly well. I don't understand why Spotify would be obligated to serve that need, or indeed serve any content they own that they do not want to serve.

This is not something Spotify woke up one day and decided to do of their own volition, with their own free market defined property. There was much more to it than that.

The White House(!) was calling for this type of censorship! Do you think that might be relevant to the discussion?

this is the new "freedom of speech" sentiment

Is this double negative intentional?

Freedom of speech has never meant the right to force platforms to broadcast your message.

Nobody is violating JR’s free speech, Spotify is just acting within the framework of the agreement they made with JR.

Whether that involves only the podcast itself or limits on what he can say regarding their interactions, we don’t know because the deal is not public. But nobody forced JR to sign anything, including any potential NDAs.

Hosting that can handle load and hackers for normal people is extremely difficult.

just because your average developer today lives and breathes AWS and PaaS doesn't mean it's impossible to use the bare metal

That's a hell of a diss for everyone pouring their blood, sweat, and tears into Bing and DDG.

Now, we get the worst of both worlds, where Spotify funds the production of harmful propaganda (by their own published standards), and also starts censoring independently produced content.

Case closed.

My criteria don't matter, and Spotify's criteria have no bearing on the statement I made.

https://newsroom.spotify.com/2022-01-30/spotify-platform-rul...

Do you have a better pejorative adjective to describe Rogan's content?

If you are trying to make the distinction that "censorship" is a term with a specific definition that applies to government censorship, I don't think people really disagree with that either, they're just using the phrase loosely because nobody's provided a better concept to apply. Call it corpo-sensorship, or corpoship, or whatever, but until there's a better word people will just keep using the more digestible one in a lazy way.

The issue is not _that_ the episodes were deleted.

The issue is that social pressure resulted in removal of information from (what is considered by most as) the "public realm". This information comes in the form of "open" (seeming) discussion with people who hold various views. This type of debate and discussion should be encouraged by our society.

This stands in stark contrast with the profit motivator that drives those who govern these "public realm"-ish services. This is not a matter of the free market being free, but more that our society is becoming greatly dependent on services that are intrinsically business driven. Those services being seen as the "open forum" that they are not needs to be fixed.

But : the negotiation would have run very very different if they would have said :we buy it, but will never use or publish it!

He might have still sold (for a higher price) or rejected the offer.

You can't change the "purpose" of a contract after it was made.

In german, we have a law, yes a law, basically saying : in treu und glauben (in good faith / in trust and believe) it basically prevents contractors to write contracts which fuck over signers.

It is super rarely used for misuse of contract law / information of the signer, but sometimes it is. This is probably one of those cases.

In good faith, that Spotify will publish his work, he signed the contract.

Being a proponent of free markets doesn't prevent me from criticizing how that freedom is exercised.

> What Spotify chooses to do with it is completely up to them, even if they bought it with the express intention of "burning" it all, i.e. never broadcasting it, that would still not be censorship

It is censorship by any reasonable definition. It's just not illegal censorship.

That's an especially rich take considering the controversy is over actions a company is taking specifically to address other peoples' complaints.

I just don’t want to support it.

So I moved to Apple Music.

For example, if too many episodes are deleted, he will maybe not at all feel the fulfillment and happiness of doing the job he previously enjoyed. That factor ultimately decides if keeping the contract or breaking it is the better solution in the long run.

Fans of JR want him to be able to publish what he wants, since it's a proxy for having fulfilling job and successful podcast. Getting paid a lot is a forgettable factor - once that money is already safely streaming in :)

There was an uproar. What is ironic, one of the party's postulates (visible on their website as a standalone slogan) was that they want to change the law so that businesses can refuse service to any person or group for any reason.

And well, Facebook exercised this law. :)

You can but it needs to be handled through the free market. One shouldn't be asking any government to step in and make some person or company do something.

Then again supporting free market leads to many other unethical things than censorship. Like slavery, why shouldn't you be able to sell some person or yourself to slavery? That is entirely in accord of free markets.

If the government openly pressures Spotify, that is government censorship, which is literally what just happened.

Second:

Because there isn’t a good alternative for distribution.

There really isn’t.

Because the press employs less people nationwide than any time since … who knows, before the 1950s.

We need good information. We need uncensored information and this includes misinformation. We need to hear opinions and points of view including contrarian, controversial, and fringe ones.

I got an something important out of that Alex Jones returns episode. No one else I know thought it had any value, but for whatever reason I saw value in it.

What is the uncensored alternative? Truly.

If cloudflare can shut down whoever they want, if social media shuts down whoever they want, what is the real solution?

If we don’t have an answer, we don’t have free speech, so talking about Spotify being a private company is true but it can’t be viewed in isolation.

This is absolutely false on both counts.

First: at no point did the government pressure spotify to specifically take down content.

Second: answering a question asked to you about what you think about a current event would not constitute censorship anyways.

But I do think there is an issue where companies that are monopolies control large parts of public discourse.

I would prefer the right to be able to participate in public discourse without being tied to particular companies. For example, interoperability protocols for messaging and social networking.

Then people have the power to engage with who they like and companies can no longer control the flow of information in the same way. In the earlier days of the internet this is what it was like, before Facebook and Twitter monopolised and controlled information flow.

Do you believe governments should force private companies to serve people they don’t want to? If so, then you understand how civil rights work. It’s not enough to ensure the government respects our rights, the government must also ensure that private companies respect our rights. Free speech has become a civil rights issue.

I don't believe political viewpoints fall into that category, but I'm willing to hear any good arguments that they should be.

If you don’t believe that political viewpoints should be a protected category then you are condoning private entities pressuring the public into certain political viewpoints. If I cannot use Spotify unless I agree with their politics then that will strongly influence me to agree with their politics to the extent that their product has utility in my life, which may be to a significant degree. This may be in a situation where my politics wouldn’t ordinarily align with Spotify’s if I were left to my own critical thinking.

I believe we should generally limit the amount of influence private companies have on the political viewpoints of the population. Especially when these private companies can be very powerful corporations controlled by a relatively small amount of people. Especially in a democracy.

I think we need to limit their power by ensuring that no company can have such a monopoly, and I'd like to see greater choice and interoperability. Break up the network effect that gives them this control.

I don't think making political viewpoints a protected characteristic is a good way to achieve that, and would cause as many problems as it would solve.

By this logic, civil rights for race, etc. was not a good way to solve the discrimination issue. The real solution would have been to break up large companies since if there are no large companies then different races and sexes could just open up their own businesses to serve their own communities without the need to force other small business owners to serve people they do not want to serve.

But that is obviously not the problem civil rights aim to solve. Allowing companies to discriminate by any identity characteristic promotes the Balkanization of society which is something we do not want. Democrat and republican enclaves are just as fractious to the nation as white and black enclaves.

What problems would civil rights for political orientation cause that civil rights for race, sex, etc. do not cause?

I agree balkanisation is a big issue. We actually have that anyway with large service providers hosting everything, e.g. filter bubbles, AI driven news feeds, etc. Balkanisation in information flow can be mitigated by requiring interoperability protocols, to prevent lock-in to particular service providers.

I want to remove the ability of large companies to be able to monitor and manipulate information flow in society. Not just for political viewpoints, but for everything. So I guess I have wider goals than this specific issue.

To your question on what problems would be caused by civil rights for political viewpoints that don't apply to the others, I would return to the fact that other protected characteristics are essentially innate to a person and aren't a matter of choice, and are relatively easy to define. Pretty much anything anyone says can be viewed as a political statement, or it can be argued as such. You would have to carve out a large number of exceptions and argue them all on a case by case basis, and by law in many cases. Is hate speech permitted? Incitement to violence? Spreading dangerous mis-information? Who assesses whether a statement is a political statement or an exception that is not protected?

I don't see the above as any kind of rebuttal of your position. I'm still thinking about your arguments, it's just what I have right now. Not sure how much longer we can go in this thread, but thanks for giving me an interesting and thought provoking debate!

To address this question, there is at least 200 years of US common law available to evaluate whether or not something should be protected under the first amendment. I’m simply suggesting that we protect the same rights to speech in the private sphere that we already do in the public sphere, at the very least for companies whose main line of business is serving as a platform for the speech of others that would otherwise be generally open to the public. In the age of privately owned and centralized online media platforms and marketplaces, extending civil rights to free speech seems logical.

> thanks for giving me an interesting and thought provoking debate!

Thank you too

Left-wing market anarchists (e.g. the C4SS) would respond that anything involving "intellectual property" is an inherently unfree market that unjustly upholds monopolies on artificially scarce immaterial goods through the threat of state violence.

Does that include Monsanto poisoning the ground? Blackwater lobbying for war in the third world?

Yes, I agree with almost everything you said. However, the issue is that platforms are consolidated. Depending on your chosen format of content, there are only 2-3 viable platforms to reach people - and for some types of content, only one.

And if those very small number of platforms decide to, or are pressured to, delist content or a content creator, this is bad. Okay, you don't want to call it 'censorship', so lets invent a new term - 'kindacensorship'. Kindacensorship is identical to censorship. It has all the properties of censorship and all the negative effects of censorship.

If we had our present day internet infrastructure in the 1950s, there would have been moral outrage at, for example, gay content. And youtube and twitch and reddit would be kindacensoring all gay creators, and all who say that maybe homosexuality isn't so bad, and everything culturally adjacent to these topics. Because the majority demands it. And the majority would have demanded it, because that was the culture of the 1950s.

Then, all those gay creators would have been forced off all platforms, all internet infrastructure, and from all types of mainstream media - tv, radio, etc. Yes, they could have still written their thoughts, but it is an absolute guarantee that they'd languish in obscurity, reaching only each other, but not the masses.

(If we had our present day internet infrastructure in the 1900s, there would have been moral outrage at people talking about desegragation. Or wanting to abolish the monarchy. Or communism.)

Is it not obvious that this would have been bad? Kindacensorship would have stopped dissenters, would have halted the social evolution. And this is exactly what is happening now. The only reason silencing gay people sounds bad, and silencing Joe Rogan sounds good, is because the one message is culturally acceptable, and the other has not yet passed to the Overton window of acceptability. And if we allow kindacensorhip to grow, we will culturally stagnate. All dissenters will be silenced.

Kindacensorship is identical to censorship in form, and in function. Who cares that it's not the government banning books, and it's a (very) small cabal of technological companies deciding what can and cannot be said? Is this somehow better? I genuinely don't think it is.

And I don't know what I'm proposing, exactly. Not sure I know how I'd renegotiate the social contract. I just know that I'm seeing kindacensorship everywhere and it. is. bad.

Joe Rogan made a decision to take the money and give in to a corporation trying to make a podcast monopoly a reality. Who is to complain when the inevitable abuse of power ensues? If it didn't happen now, when podcasts are still open and standardized, it would've happened later once podcasts became proprietary.

Everyone isn't always going to agree with you, and they have their own rights.

You're having a hard time articulating what you mean because it doesn't really make sense. If you can force someone to publish and promote something they don't want to, they can force you to publish and promote something you don't want to. The cause of liberty has not been served if this happens.

If this is a battle you want to fight, I might suggest starting with the book banning efforts by Republicans (the actual government) across many states that’s going on right now.

Maybe he shouldn't have. And yet I am saying, in this world in which he did, Spotify shouldn't censor him.

>If this is a battle you want to fight, I might suggest starting with the book banning efforts by Republicans

Yes, book banning is also bad, I agree. (???)

There is no shortage of broadcast platforms. They are not consolidated. In the podcast space alone there are apple, Spotify, YouTube music, stitcher, and self-hosting. And then there are all the non-podcast broadcast modalities.

It's not like Spotify is sending hit squads out to shake down artists that don't join the racket, or harass studios and sites that host content they disagree with.

There is a lot you can do with a big microphone, but perhaps the Internet isn't and never will be the utopia that people imagined it would be. In a different world where large tech companies were completely hands off and governments embraced a speech free for all, many people will still feel that they don't fit in mainstream spaces and will need to find another forum.

Yes, I agree, this used to be how things worked. Counter-culture movement appears, gains some followers, some leaders, gains momentum, and gradually or overnight breaks into the mainstream.

And this is precisely what happened here - a counter-culture movement tired with the establishment, a lot of followers, some leaders, some momentum - but the moment where change would actually happen is now impossible.

>alternate spaces

What alternate spaces? If Joe Rogan moves his podcast to Apple Music, they are going to ban him. If he had stayed on youtube, they would have removed his channel. If he creates his own app, it's going to be banned in the play store and app store. If he moves to a smaller, existing app, it's going to be protested and banned.

Yes, it's technically possible, there are some options. But they're all terrible. They are not a way to reach the mainstream.

But what you're describing isn't some historical hypothetical nor is the current situation some brand-new phenomenon; it's literally how "content" has worked for more or less the entirety of human history. There in fact was no easily available gay content in the 1950s because society and culture demanded it not be available in the relatively small number of places available at the time where content could be consumed. Not only was gay content censored in the 1950s, but it was censored far more effectively than anything today since people had much more limited ways of obtaining content. Forget having to find a less popular podcast platform, if you were shut out of the handful of TV networks, radio stations, and newspapers, basically the only way you could have a voice is handing out leaflets on a street corner.

If the concern is that people be able to express unpopular ideas to a wide audience, we are in a far, far better place than we were at any point in history. Sure, there aren't unlimited platforms that allow you to easily reach millions and millions of people, but a few decades ago even wildly popular content would struggle to find that kind of audience and most things that were even mildly alternative would struggle to reach an audience at all.

I think the reason some people interpret the current state of affairs as some horrific free speech backsliding, even though all available evidence suggests people in general have more of a voice than ever, is that the voices that attract negative attention now are different. Historically it was usually content that was too "liberal" (for lack of a better word) that was censored, as with your gay content example. Now though, viewpoints associated with the more conservative[1] parts of society are suddenly facing unpopularity and it feels like a new thing simply because it involves people who aren't used to being on the receiving end of that kind of soft-censorship or whatever you want to call it.

My intent is not to take a specific position on whether such soft-censorship is good or bad, but if we're going to productively discuss the topic it seems like treating it as a brand new phenomenon is unlikely to get us to a useful place. In particular because in misdiagnosing the problem, we end up going down a path that's less about free expression and more about conservative ideas being entitled to a platform.

[1] Since I'm sure someone will object to this characterization, I realize Joe Rogan is generally not considered a conservative. However the views he's expressed that have caused the current Spotify trouble are definitely associated with conservatives in America.

I see this same argument constantly, in nearly every discussion about a company doing anything bad. It's a meaningless point. Do you people posting things like this really not understand the distinction between right and legal? Or do you think moral considerations are beneath discussion?

Take a look at what happened with Parler. It was a rare successful challenger, although small by comparison, to big social media. Then AOC pressured a few companies to ban Parler and they all complied - whether to build favor with legislators that might regulate them or because it aligned with their politics. The claim that people can just build their own platform doesn’t work in a market this distorted.

As for your redefinition of censorship - I disagree. Legal or contractual allowance doesn’t change what it is. This is censorship.

What I don't understand is how this idea comes up every time something like this is discussed. I'm assuming that this does not receive convincing counter-arguments which is why I will attempt to do so here.

Almost everyone who believes in free markets (except maybe a very few libertarian anarchists) belives in regulation of the markets to restrict bad actors or unintended harmful side effects to the market or the people in general.

Being a proponent of free markets does not mean that you support the idea that market participants can break the laws for the sake of the markets. It also does not mean that one believes the existing laws and regulations are correct and sufficient. Everyone understands that it is an organic process where companies will test the regulations and regulatory bodies have to monitor and act on it constantly.

Some of it requires affected people discussing it and making the regulators and market participants know about the bad effects they feel so that something can be done about it, in one way or another.

I can imagine there being regulations forcing these content hosting platforms to not be able to take down content unless it is explicitly breaking the law as long as they are being compensated for it with no price discrimination. Similar regulations already apply to a lot of businesses.

I believe it's because there has not been a consistently applied general principle of free markets articulated, which the removal of episodes here violates.

I think this is a simple example of the people with wallets using said wallets to indicate what they will and won't tolerate.

"White House press secretary Jen Psaki called on music and podcast streaming giant Spotify to do “more” in the fight against Covid-19 misinformation on Tuesday.

At her daily press briefing, President Joe Biden’s top spokeswoman was asked about a decision by the company to add disclaimers linking to Covid-19 information hubs to any piece of content that includes discussion of the pandemic, vaccines, or Covid-19 itself. She responded that the change was a good step, but that the company could take steps (if it wanted) to actively prohibit content that contained misinformation that experts have warned is prolonging the pandemic and leading to more deaths."

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

What is the issue here? It sounds like you only like half the coin.

That's simple enough, but it's also simplistic because it assumes that property rights are the only thing we should care about.

Which value is more important - property rights (which depend on socialized services like justice and enforcement) or free speech (which thrive by removing regulation)?

This is a non-issue.

There's also another issue: the customer wanting to listen to those podcasts and who valued them as part of their Spotify subscription.

And that's not due to free market "those didn't were listened to enough, so we took them off" (that wasn't the case, and even if it was storage and distribution costs are negligible anyway, they could still keep them in perpetuity).

Instead that customer got shafted because "some" forced Spotify's hand.

How do we know this?

Many markets show that they work best with a goldilocks-level of just-right regulation, and the level depends on the market.

Don't ask us, ask J.R.. He remains free to return the 100 million to Spotify and broadcast his stupid crap elsewhere.

And they did. They published those episodes.

Consistently with a free market, customers of Spotify should also be able to do with them as they pleased - listen to them or not, or even leave Spotify in protest.

Instead, some pressure groups, the media, and a couple of unrelated musicians forced Spotify to unpublish those.

How did anyone "force" Spotify to do anything? Various people put public pressure on Spotify and Spotify took the action that it presumably thought was optimal for its bottom line. Which companies do all the time.

By making it costly not to do it, not in a free market (vote with wallets) way, but in a "will hurt you with bad publicity, government pressure, etc" way. Forcing doesn't need to be a gun in the head of the CEO.

>Various people put public pressure on Spotify and Spotify took the action that it presumably thought was optimal for its bottom line. Which companies do all the time.

Yes, like corporations did when they censored works because of pressure groups, like Tipper Gore's, stuff that promoted "homosexuality" or "decadent" black music in the past, etc.

Doesn't mean it was left to the individual customers to decide, or that corporations deemed the works they sold as unprofitable in themselves (that is, not selling).

Only unprofitable as in "not worth the trouble".

Which is a totally different thing.

Wait, that’s exactly what needs to be happening in order to call it “forcing.” If there is a (difficult) choice, it’s not force.

The long-standing tradition has been war. The long-standing tradition has been war even among those that made the same choice but think that means something slightly different.