A recent report claims that employees at the music streaming service Spotify are requesting direct oversight of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, giving them the power to completely ban certain episodes.
Digital Music News reports that a group of employees at Spotify are pushing to implement direct editorial oversight over the Joe Rogan Experience podcast before the episodes go live. This would give the employees chances to include content flags, trigger warnings, fact-checking references, or the ability to refuse to publish an episode entirely.
The demands from employees come after users noted that a number of episodes from the podcast had not been uploaded to Spotify following the move from YouTube to the music streaming service. These episodes included guests such as Ale Jones, Gavin McInnes, Owen Benjamin, and Stefan Molyneux.
Vice News recently reported that Spotify employees have held more than ten meetings to discuss possible changes to the podcast, including giving employees the ability to remove additional episodes. One podcast guest that employees have reportedly focused on is Abigail Shrier, who wrote Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Many employees reportedly demanded that the episode be removed, yet it still remains on the Spotify platform.
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek reportedly told employees during an all-hands meeting: “Joe Rogan and the episode in question have been reviewed extensively. The fact that we aren’t changing our position doesn’t mean we aren’t listening. It just means we made a different judgment call.”
Ek also instructed employees not to leak conversations to the media — which they promptly did — telling them that if they did so they would be excluded from future content moderation discussions, stating: “If we can’t have open, confidential debates, we will have to move those discussions to closed doors.”
In a recent episode, Rogan claimed that left-wing activists were intentionally setting wildfire in states such as Oregon. Rogan has since issued an apology via his Instagram page, whether the apology was made following pressure from Spotify is unknown.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
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