FreeSpeech and Censorship: Thread

[grarpamp]

Spotify Has Officially Become The Battleground For Big Tech's
Censorship Civil War

https://quoththeraven.substack.com/p/spotify-has-officially-become-the

Far be it for me to be sensationalist, but it looks like Spotify has
become the official venue where the big tech censorship civil war is
about to take place.

Or, perhaps where it has already started.

Spotify has been in the news over the past few weeks because it has
been home to “controversial” podcast host Joe Rogan. And let me tell
you, “controversial” isn’t what it used to be.

Nowadays, Rogan is considered “controversial” because he’s someone
that - <gasp> - allows individuals to speak their opinions and listens
to both sides of the story while presenting a spectrum of takes on
political and social issues that runs the gamut and may not conform to
the mainstream narrative or “the science”.

It was only days ago that I wrote about how I thought Rogan would
reshape the mainstream media landscape single-handedly and how his
“controversial” style of open-minded discussion may benefit both
political parties in the upcoming presidential election, should they
be wise enough to adopt it.

This week, the decrepit clutches of cancel culture continued their
“war” against Rogan (read: open minded discussion) in the form of 76
year old aging rock star Neil Young, who threatened to pull his
catalog of music - which he doesn’t even fully own the rights to -
from Spotify as a result of what he calls “misinformation” being
presented on Rogan’s show.
Neil Young tells Spotify to remove music over Joe Rogan vaccine
misinformation Photo: The Verge

Now that we’ve redefined “controversial” as “open minded discussion”,
it’s also crucial we redefine “misinformation”. Nowadays,
“misinformation” means any utterance of thoughts that weren’t handed
down directly from Dr. Anthony Fauci, the CDC, the mainstream media or
global elites and central planners.

In response to Young’s temper tantrum this week, Spotify did precisely
nothing and, at Young’s request, deftly pulled the artist’s music from
their platform.

Perhaps feeling defeated by Spotify’s common sense decision, or
perhaps motivated by the perverse amount of press Young received for
his “declaration against misinformation”, a second septuagenarian
former rocker, 78 year old Joni Mitchell, also joined the fray and
threatened to pull her music from Spotify, as well.

As her reasoning for the ultimatum, Mitchell claimed that
“irresponsible people are spreading lies”. At first, I thought maybe
she had looked back on the “official” declarations that cloth masks
would work against the virus, vaccinations would end Covid altogether
and that ivermectin was nothing more than veterinary horse paste.
Instead, it turns out she, too, was referring to Rogan’s podcast.
Photo: Insider

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that people threatening to pull their
music from Spotify are extremely wealthy. Mitchell has an estimated
net worth of $100 million and Young has an estimated net worth of $200
million.

I’m not sure these once rebellious, freedom seeking musicians have
taken the time to consider those who are now in the shoes they were
once in, reliant upon platforms like Spotify for their pittance of
royalties as they embark on the beginning stages of their careers. For
Young and Mitchell, it clearly isn’t about who else may be affected by
a downturn in Spotify’s business. For them, anything is justified in
upholding their opinions, ideologies and political beliefs as it comes
to what is and isn’t acceptable free speech.

People like Young and Mitchell have become unfortunate shells of what
they used to represent while they were writing and performing music
decades ago. Worse than that, they’ve become hypocrites, trampling
over the very same first amendment they banked on to give them the
voice they used to make themselves extravagantly wealthy as
counter-culture songwriters in the first place.

Young and Mitchell were immense successes because they tapped into the
same vein of American culture that Rogan now resides in: the incessant
need to hear “the other side of the story” from what “the man” was
preaching. Whether the dialogue is about protesting the Vietnam war or
Covid lockdowns is moot: these are the issues of our respective
generations.

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The irony is uncanny, if you can zoom out and look at the bigger
picture. Joe Rogan is now what these artists used to be: an
iconoclast.

My guess is that more aging rockers may also follow suit and that,
even if they don’t, the fever pitch to censor Joe Rogan is going to be
dialed up even further for Spotify.

Many people may be thinking we have seen what Spotify is made of in
its decision to tell Neil Young to go pound sand; but how will the
platform react if a barrage of artists starts to make similar threats?

As a believer in capitalism, I wouldn’t be surprised if Spotify is
taking a risk/reward approach to this battle in the boardroom. After
all, they have shareholders, and there likely is, in fact, some dollar
amount that may cause them to cave on Rogan’s deal.

Don’t say it isn’t possible: remember, in a similar analogue, NBC
parted ways with Megyn Kelly after just two years, leaving her with
the spoils of a $69 million contract just because the network faced
feverish outcry from the woke mob.

I just hope that Spotify takes the time to realize that it is in an
extremely unique position. If the company continues to have a backbone
and is the first to consistently and publicly dissent against the
methods of its big tech peers - names like Google, Twitter and Amazon
– who don’t seem to have any issues censoring at the first sign of one
pimple faced teenager complaining behind a laptop screen and a Reddit
forum – they truly have a unique have an opportunity to be on the
right side of history going forward.

And that can win them favor that money could never compete with.

As much as businesses may see this as a war based on economics, it is
also a war that I believe will grow deep enough to be based on
ideologies.

The fact is you are either for politicians, elites, and large
technology companies dictating what you can and can not have the right
to consider when making decisions, or you support the idea of being
able to consider opinions from all ends of the spectrum in order to
make your personal decisions.

You are either an advocate for stifling one entire half of an argument
- which admittedly may contain the boogeyman disguised as some actual
misinformation - or you are pro freedom of speech and an individual’s
right to decide for themselves.

And most importantly, you either have the wherewithal to understand
that the official narrative has, and will, continue to get things
wrong (vaccines would wipe out Covid, for example) and that opinions
labeled as “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories” can sometimes
turn out to be the objective truth (like the lab leak ‘theory’), or
you don’t.

If your intentions are only to seek out objective truths, why would
you turn away anyone’s opinion before sifting away at all available
information before trying to arrive at the facts?

These are questions and concepts that Spotify needs to be asking
itself very carefully.

While, from a monetary standpoint, canceling Joe Rogan may, at some
point, look like it makes sense on paper, the music giant needs to ask
itself at the end of the day: are they the battleground for something
even more important than money?

We have yet to see a mainstream big tech company take a serious stand
against censorship.  Spotify: are you prepared to be the first?