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Is Spotify Already Trying to Censor Joe Rogan?

Some people will tell you that only the government can perform the act of censorship and others will crusade in favor of corporate censorship, usually on the basis of “family values” or Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance; these people are all idiots. Censorship in any form is bad for society as a whole and corporate censorship is especially insidious because it only ever represents the views of the entrenched power and social elites.

Spotify recently spent $100 million to become the exclusive home of The Joe Rogan Experience, the most popular podcast in the history of the internet. Kind of sucks to be Adam Carolla, he was on top of the world until Rogan showed up with all the advantages he has over Carolla like being funny and not being borderline retarded.

It mostly blew over that when Spotify imported Rogan’s back-catalog to the platform they excluded several episodes with controversial guests like Alex Jones. I don’t normally listen to Rogan but I always tune in when he has Alex Jones on because Alex Jones is completely unhinged and it’s hilarious to listen to the stupid bullshit that comes out of his mouth. He’s basically one rung away from David Icke on the crazy ladder, and that dude thinks the British royal family are lizard people when in actuality they’re just racist.

But now reports are trickling out that a number of Spotify employees are very insistent that they want to censor new episodes of Rogan’s podcast when it becomes exclusive to Spotify’s platform later this year. According to Vice, Spotify has ten meetings about Rogan’s podcast, mostly about employees demanding Rogan’s podcast be censored and Digital Music News reported that Spotify employees want editorial control over Rogan’s podcast, essentially telling Rogan what he can say and what guests he can book. Employees reportedly want to “introduce direct editing oversight over The Joe Rogan Experience — before the episodes go live. That includes content flags, trigger warnings, references to fact-checked information, or simply refusing to publish an episode at all.”

The reason that Joe Rogan is so popular is that he’s free to speak his mind, unfiltered by corporate interests and network standards and practices. In Spotify’s press release announcing the acquisition of Rogan’s podcast exclusively on their platform, they even said that “While Spotify will become the exclusive distributor of JRE, Rogan will maintain full creative control over the show,” because they understood that no one likes standards and practices controlling shows.

A lot of chatter about censorship today casts those on the political left as the censors, mostly because of stories like this, a since the problem these people have with Rogan is things he’s said about trans people and jokes he’s made about Caitlyn Jenner. But historically network censorship has pushed a conservative agenda, keeping couples in separate beds and keeping gay characters and interracial couples off the air.

People in favor of censorship always just assume they will always be the ones censoring things, but that’s never the case. All you do is make it okay for big corporations to take creative control away from the people that audiences actually want to hear from. Luckily, in this case, Rogan probably thought to have retaining creative control of his show in his contract, which is why Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has pushed back against employees who want to censor Rogan; they shelled out a hundred million dollars because people want to listen to Joe Rogan, not to the opinions of the Spotify Spectrum Employee Relations Group.

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Dave Rubin
Dave Rubin
3 years ago

Good. If anybody needs to be censored, it’s Joe Rogan.

jimmy
jimmy
3 years ago

Joe is joining a corporation…censorship emerges…Carolla doesn’t seem so retarded now.

Tyrone
Tyrone
3 years ago

Let the communist crybabies go, and keep Joe.