I don't really agree with the "all censorship is bad" argument either. The counterarguments are too obvious - every viable community on the internet has a moderator team or equivalent. And it isn't really a question of whether this can be done. Spotify have done it and nobody is pointing to a broken law. There isn't anything interesting here legally or technically speaking (and that is proper - Spotify should control what is accessible on Spotify).

The problem here is Spotify are screwing up their editorial responsibilities. Joe Rogan has reached the sort of critical mass where he gets to decide what is in the public's interest to talk about. These faceless censors at Spotify aren't qualified to do that, or qualified to decide what is and isn't misinformation. They are acting foolishly outside their wheelhouse of creating platforms. They are screwing up by taking down interesting and entertaining content, making decisions that is going to get a very large audience upset with them.

They pay Rogan because he is better at this sort of decision than they are. This is a poor follow up.

I agree that many outlets are screwing up their editorial policies, and Spotify definitely doesn't seem to be putting any effort into that regard. But I think Joe Rogan also screwed up his editorial responsibilities to some extent. He said it himself, that he doesn't research the topics beforehand, he just begins thinking about things on the spot as the interview unfolds and that he doesn't present the opposite views or make clear what level of disagreement the topic has.

He seems to have higher standards than conventional news. It is reliatively rare to see Rogan asserting something that he has to know is false (apart from the obvious things like those long-form ads at the start of the podcast).

Going straight to politics, which is what really upsets people about Rogan, the standard here is people who spent multiple years of sustained campaigning confidently speculating that the US president is in league with the Russians. Or people before that who spent years onfidently speculating that the president was a Muslim trying to institute the Sharia in Texas or something crazy like that. I don't really remember the sillyness that far back in the Obama years. Joe Rogan at least has credentialed guests and lets them talk off-narritive. In that CNN horse-paste interview he had a CNN guy on who could have challenged him back or defended the position.

Rogan has much, much higher standards than what has traditionally been done for politics. He's probably doing better than traditional news reporting in other areas too.

Agreed. I see this as a result of Spotify avoiding risks:

1. to not lose as many customers as possible who are outraged with Rogan — maybe they did the math based on advertising profiling.

2. to not lose Joe Rogan, one of the most popular shows they have, and thus, customers/users.

3. to not spark further outrage from other popular artists who might leave.

4. to protect their name and brand.

5. to avoid being removed from the Apple App Store when Apple eventually lays the ban hammer down because "their app is spreading misinfo", just like the Alex Jones debacle that empowered Apple to assess app availability based on their political whims and agreement (abhorrent by the way). This goes for other platforms.

6. to avoid banks who manage their funds from canceling them for supporting a show, person, or stance the bank disagrees with.

We are truly in an ugly mess of global political wars where even the slightest wrong move in speech/expression will completely ruin a company or person's ability to survive—well, maybe survival isn't the issue, but undue harm is.

This is especially on the Left, who are too ready and willing to spark that ruin, viewing legal systems and power only as a tool to control their opposition, who has valid stances on myriad topics. On the Right, they complain a lot, but at least they aren't using any means necessary to actively change the fundamental course of people's lives, livelihood, and futures due to what boils down to a political disagreement in the realm of speech/expression.

We can't pretend that science is inherently fact just because it leads to forming facts later, when it has always been described as a a fallible process of discovery, leading to theories, which are either supported by evidence or amply refuted.

In this case, the doctors Rogan hosted, along with 100k+ other doctors globally have refuted the mainstream claims around vaccines and the handling of treatment — enough to require panels of discussion and enormous scrutiny towards the likes of Fauci and others who are claiming to "be science," in nothing other than pure dripping hubris and condescension towards anyone who dares to question them.

This is one problem we should be addressing, in addition to the censor-or-fail mentality affecting nearly every publishing platform.

> This is especially on the Left, who are too ready and willing to spark that ruin, viewing legal systems and power only as a tool to control their opposition, who has valid stances on myriad topics. On the Right, they complain a lot, but at least they aren't using any means necessary to actively change the fundamental course of people's lives

If you look politically, it is just as true, and historically much more so I feel from the American right, which has normally had the church and the puritans on its side, and has always fought to get sex, LGBTQ, minorities, and even science removed from popular channels of discourse.

Also, as someone who follows the science, I'm not seeing 100k+ researchers with published data refuting the science. Doctors are not all scientist. Most practitioners have their own belief system, often from their own daily biases. And in the medical science community, it turns out, those things are being investigated, but are still far from being unambiguous and evidence backed. The policy makers are taking risks one way or another, because they're having to make decisions with limited scientific analysis, data, and experiments.

When you think of scientific consensus, what do you think it means? It is a confidence score in the current state of data and experiment. It is an assessment of given what we know today, what is most likely true. You can take bets against it, because it is probabilities and not certainties, science is always probabilistic unlike religion. But if you're a policy maker, taking a bet against the current odds seem like a gamble you shouldn't be making.

Thus from my stance, this is all political, and science is doing the right thing, and most policy makers that follows scientific consensus are just playing it safe with the odds.

The people who are trying to discredit science and the consensus are taking political bets, they want to discredit things to gain power, in the off chance the consensus is wrong, they win big politically, in the many more likely odds they'd be wrong, most people won't notice and it won't make the news.

The effect of it all though, from my point of view, is actually that it is used once again by the right as a way to convince people science is wrong all along. Which goes back to my initial take, historically, the right has always tried to silence science, and this to me is just another attempt at discrediting its processes and misrepresenting it's propositions and stance. It's trying to get people to instead believe that the political leaders and key scientists that have become agent of politics are more trustworthy than science itself, and that they now should listen to them exclusively for the real truth.