Allegations of racism and deletion of episodesĪfter surviving Young’s decision and its fallout seemingly unfazed, Rogan’s podcast found itself mired in another controversy when a compilation of clips of Rogan using a racial slur during his podcast went viral. In Rogan’s case, the deal is worth $100 million. However, many have pointed out that Spotify cannot escape responsibility for the content, given it is paying some of the hosts millions of dollars. In his initial defence of the podcast and Spotify’s lack of action, Daniel Ek had claimed that the company was a combination of a publisher and a platform in what seemed like a bid to absolve it off any responsibility for the content it hosts. It can be well suited for dealing with misinformation “superspreaders”, which is important, considering a recent report by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, which held that 12 people are responsible for up to 73 per cent of the disinformation on social media platforms. This responsive regulation approach advocates using soft remedies before escalating to more permanent measures, including termination of accounts. YouTube and Twitter have a strike system where content creators get a scale of penalties based on the number of times their content violates policy. Most social media platforms employ a combination of soft and hard remedies to address misinformation. Seemingly exploiting a loophole in its own policy, the platform decided not to take any action against Joe Rogan. But it will only take action against creators if the content falls into two categories: it either has to assert that the pandemic is a hoax, or it has to be content that encourages people to get infected deliberately. It revealed that it has rules in place to stop harmful messages regarding the pandemic. In terms of content moderation, Spotify began to take an approach similar to Facebook, focusing its efforts on labelling content with warnings and directing users to information hubs instead of taking concrete action against creators.

The controversy forced Spotify’s hand to release its content policy regarding Covid-19 on 30 January. Diwali Offer | Up to 1 year free Spotify releases details on ‘Covid-19 policy’

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