On the Joe Rogan/Neil Young Controversy
Dropping Rogan from Spotify's platform won't achieve anything
On January 24th of 2022, Canadian-American artist Neil Young wrote an open letter to the audio streaming service Spotify, threatening to remove his music from their platform if they didn’t remove The Joe Rogan Experience—the successful podcast run by, well, Joe Rogan—from their platform. The reason is that The Joe Rogan Experience has been criticized for platforming controversial guests that have spread misinformation surrounding Covid-19 and the related vaccines. Rogan himself has been criticized for similar reasons. Two days later, on the 26th, Young’s music was removed by Spotify, while The Joe Rogan Experience remains.
I feel it prudent to start by mentioning that, yes, I do think a lot of what Rogan and (some of) his guests have said regarding Covid-19 and the vaccines is a load of shit. Rogan, to me, is the best possible figurehead to represent the quote of “Be open-minded, but not so open-minded that your brain falls out.” At some point, he’s going to have to learn to make his more controversial guests do some level of critical thought about their established beliefs. But frankly, I don’t see that happening any time soon. A lot of his audience like him because he seems like—and it seems like this to me also—just a genuine dude who thinks and talks about whatever he finds interesting. Combine that with the fact that they likely also have zero trust in mainstream media and institutions, and it’s easy to see why they prefer to get their Covid-19 information from him.
That said, I honestly don’t see how dropping Rogan’s podcast from Spotify would help at all. The most likely outcome is that Rogan would simply move the podcast—and the people who listen to it—onto another platform. If you really wanted to stop Rogan from spreading Covid-19 misinformation on his podcast, you would have to somehow stop him from airing the podcast altogether—or at least stop him from airing Covid-19 related episodes. And that is a no-go, for what should hopefully be obvious reasons. Which leads me to the question of whether this qualifies as attempted censorship, to which I would say… technically?
I’m firmly of the belief that any purposeful, coordinated attempt to suppress someone’s speech qualifies as censorship. We often think of government censorship, but any similarly powerful or influential entity, like a university or a large corporation, is capable of censorship, and of creating an environment where you must watch what you say if you don’t want severe punishment. If punishing people for expressing unpopular views becomes normalized, it can have a similar speech-chilling effect that government censorship would, even if the government itself isn’t doing anything. That said, even if Young had succeeded in getting Spotify to drop The Joe Rogan Experience from their platform, he probably wouldn’t have succeeded in slowing the spread of misinformation from that podcast, at least not for very long. Like I said, Rogan would likely just move to a different platform. Thus, if it is censorship, it wouldn’t be very effective.
This leads me to a final question—why are people so eager for platforms like Spotify to use the banhammer on those that they see as wrong? To prevent the spread of misinformation, right? Hasn’t that been tried before?
I think the answer to that question is that a lot of these folks—the people who want Spotify to drop Rogan’s podcast, and in general think banning users that spread misinformation would help to stop it—are in some way dependent on mainstream institutions to help them make sense of the world, in the same way a lot of Trumpists are dependent on places and people like Fox News, OANN, Robert Malone (an anti-vax doctor that Rogan had on as a guest), etc. This isn’t to say that the information presented by mainstream institutions is wrong. But there’s a dearth of critical thinking in society today. Because there’s a group of people in society that has zero trust in mainstream institutions and thus turns to alternative sources of information, there’s also another group of people who trust mainstream institutions too much, and don’t want to let go of that excess trust no matter what, even if the institution gets something egregiously wrong on something very important. I don’t know which of those two groups came first, but ultimately that’s irrelevant. What is relevant is that these groups are allowing the institutions they trust to do all the thinking for them—including deciding what’s true and what isn’t. And that’s ultimately the root of the problem. Banning people from social media for spreading misinformation is only a condescending band-aid—it tells everyone else “No one should be exposed to this, it’s a bad influence!” We all know how that works out for parents who try and do that with their kids.
What’s really needed is for ordinary people to be able to think critically about important issues like “what to do about the XYZ pandemic,” and things like that. It’s also necessary for institutions—private and public—not to act like our parents, and to just provide the public with the correct information in the proper context. We don’t have either of those things. Forget misinformation in itself—if the current paternalistic, untrustworthy dynamic between citizens and institutions isn’t a threat to democracy, I don’t know what is.