Free censorship

I see that Spotify is getting some stick because it hosts the Joe Rogan podcast and several musicians (Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and others) object to the "misleading" Covid information that has been discussed by several of his guests. The right leaning folks who support Joe are bleating about "free speech" and the left leaning folks are bleating about "dangerous messages". The challenge with all these kinds of things of course is that both sides are right. Everyone has a right to listen to the opinions of other people, even those that they disagree with, but also, minimum standards of fact checking and balance should apply to mass media outlets who need to take some degree of responsibility for the content and the actions that it may inspire.

I listen to Joe Rogan from time to time, many of the people he has on his show are chancers and BS merchants but that's par for the course and I understand this. If you know how his show works you understand that the whole point is to engage people of all stripes in a long-form conversation in order to dig in a bit deeper than usual. This means sometimes idiots and zealots will expose themselves, but also, new truths may be introduced, and (perish the thought), sometimes people may even change their minds! The whole point is the conversation and the possibility (because of the duration) that you will leave it better informed than when you joined (even if that means understanding the other side of the argument more!). People seem to like this format, I certainly do, it doesn't mean that I agree with everything he says, but from time to time I learn something new, which is seldom the case from the soundbite journalism prevalent on TV and in other media these days. Think of his show as more of a 3 hour Newsnight episode in free-form conversation style, rather than the ten o clock news.

Of course, Neil Young and others are perfectly within their rights to withdraw support from a platform that hosts material they strongly object to, after all, there are plenty of media platforms to choose from out there so it's not like anyone will miss out too badly, it's not just the right that should have free speech!