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Free Speech Tweets

Entry 2202, on 2022-02-01 at 12:56:52 (Rating 3, News)

Well, the attempt to cancel Joe Rogan continues. Since my last post, Neil Young (remember him?) has withdrawn his music from Spotify, and yesterday, Joni Mitchell threatened to do the same. Also, allegedly Spotify is losing both subscribers and share value at a massive rate (although that is not based on credible data at this point).

If you don't know, Spotify is primarily a music streaming service, but it bought Joe Rogan's complete past and future podcast output for $100 million. That was because Joe's podcast (the Joe Rogan Experience, or JRE) is the most popular in the world and even has far more listeners than major mainstream news sources.

The "problem" (for some people) is that Joe often has guests who have controversial and "alternative" opinions. Often the guests are basically 100% legitimate, others are reasonable but might have a few unusual views, and some others are fully conspiratorial, or have other issues making them "unacceptable" to the people who see themselves as the arbiters of truth.

The main example of the last category is almost certainly Alex Jones. He is a true conspiracy theorists, to the extent that many people wonder whether he's serious or just acting out a role he has created for himself. But anyone who doesn't treat his ideas with significant skepticism is probably fairly well on board with conspiracies already, and I think it is unlikely he would convert many people to his side.

Note that I am not saying everything Jones says is false. There is a surprising amount of material he uses which is actually true. His big problem is taking a series of facts and reaching a conclusion which doesn't necessarily fit all the evidence.

So that's my summary of the controversy. I thought it might be fun to see what other people are saying about this on Twitter, and to respond to those comments myself...

Comment: The Pressure Campaign on Spotify to remove Joe Rogan reveals the religion of Liberals: censorship.

Response: If this was the only example of this phenomenon I might say this comment is too critical, but censorship of unpopular opinions - especially those contrary to leftists doctrine - has become very common recently, so this does seem to be a genuine trend.

Comment: 4 billion loss for Spotify so far. Losing Neil Young and other artists that will make their exit and keeping Joe Rogan was worth that? Short answer: hell yes.

Response: Spotify is a company and expects to make a profit. They paid a lot of money to have the JRE on their platform, but you would have to assume that if the negatives become too great they will force him to leave. I'm not aware of the details of his contract, so it's hard to see how this might happen, but he's still there so far!

Comment: The problem isn’t Joe Rogan; it’s people who demand submission to their views and seek to silence others rather than persuade.

Response: There is false information on the JRE, but there is false information on every source, so this has to be looked at on balance. But where ever the balance might be, my consistent response to this is: if you find something wrong, say why and try to get it corrected. Trying to ban someone just makes it look like you can't counter him using reasoned debate.

Comment: If Spotify doesn't censor Joe Rogan in the next ten minutes, I'm going to cancel my Spotify subscription for a couple of weeks until I miss it and reactivate it.

Response: I think there might be a lot of this. Many people will want to virtue signal and cancel Spotify, but they will probably realise the futility of that move and not go through with the threat. This is common in these situations where stupid people like to draw attention to thenselves. Remember all those celebrities who were going to leave the US when Trump became president? How many of them actually went through with that? And would anyone actually care if they did?

Comment: Wow... Neil Young and Joni Mitchell are protesting Joe Rogan... Gonna go through my grandfather's 8-tracks that nobody's touched in 40 years and try to figure out who's next.

Response: Yes, these two have been around for a while, and aren't major figures in music any more. I do like Neil Young's music, but if I had to make the choice between that and supporting free speech, I would take the free speech option every time. Anyway, I subscribe to Apple Music, not Spotify!

Comment: If Spotify dropped Joe Rogan, he’d go from being the man with the biggest podcast in the world to being nothing more than - CHECKS NOTES - the man with the biggest podcast in the world.

Response: Yes, Joe doesn't need Spotify. Prior to the deal, his podcasts were distributed on many other platforms as well as Spotify. If he was removed from it I would be quite happy, actually, because I don't like the podcast app and would prefer to get JRE episodes using another podcast client app.

Comment: This really isn’t about Rogan. Joe is a singular point of failure for narrative control. As they marginalize every other such voice, people flock to Rogan. Shutting Joe down - and preventing future Joes by threatening platforms - is about protecting power from scrutiny. Permanently.

Response: I think this is exactly what it is about. For 50 years now the people following woke ideology have followed the concept that some ideas are too dangerous to allow to exist and must be eliminated. It's just reaching a peak now.

Comment: I am fully vaxxed and I listen to Joe Rogan. I have never felt dissuaded from getting the vaccine. Only encouraged to explore a landscape of information not bound by ideology.

Response: Exactly what I think as well. I am also vaccinated, but I know about the problems with it thanks to alternative sources like the JRE. It was by knowing the problems with vaccines - which are ignored by the mainstream media - that I decided that being vaccinated was the best option, on balance.

Comment: [he/him]. I just closed my Spotify account; I have no desire to enrich dangerous pro-virus propagandists. Fortunately, it's easy and painless to move (almost everything is available elsewhere).

Response: Well, as soon as I see someone listing their pronouns, alarms start sounding! I'm not saying that listing pronouns makes a person automatically wrong, just that they are quite dedicated to the culture of virtue signalling.

Comment: Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, the doctors coming forward, the truckers protesting... a lot of good things happening this January.

Response: I agree. I am deeply troubled when i see government mandates being followed without question. Dissent from the mainstream view - whether it is right or wrong - is a sign of a healthy society. Unlike the rhetoric from some governments, we are not all in this together, one big team, etc, and we should never try to be.

Comment: I have never listened to a Joe Rogan podcast in my life but now I kind of want to.

Response: We are basically talking about the Streisand Effect here. If you don't know what it is do a search; it's very relevant to this discussion. All of this publicity will undoubtedly introduce the podcast to many who weren't aware of it before, so all of this negativity towards it might achieve the exact opposite of what is intended.

Comment: I've been on Joe Rogan's podcast twice now. Sharp guy, asks great questions, picks up on things immediately, intensely and sincerely curious. The world is a better place for having him doing podcasts.

Response: I totally agree. I think Joe does have the right attitude here. He invites interesting and controversial people and let's them speak. He does occasionally question some more extreme ideas, but he does have some of his own biases as well. I do believe the world is better with the JRE, but people need to approach it with some skepticism, a rule I would apply to every source.

Comment: Another singer who was famous in the 1970s, Joni Mitchell, has come out in protest of Joe Rogan. The pattern here seems to be people over 75 who have never even listened to a podcast, and thought Spotify was a knockoff Tide-To-Go stick until last week.

Response: I have challenged several critics of the JRE to state how many episodes of the podcast they have listened to. In every case so far they either haven't replied or admitted it was zero. They then go on to say they don't need to know anything about it to judge it. That should tell us a lot!

Comment: Do people realize that before he was on Spotify, Joe Rogan was on every podcast platform INCLUDING Spotify? Rogan’s Spotify deal arguably reduced his reach by taking him off all other podcast apps.

Response: This is a good point. I listened to the JRE long before it was exclusively on Spotify. Before that deal, it was available from every major podcast distribution service, now it is only on one. The move to Spotify was a backward step in many ways.

Comment: Yoko Ono threatens to add more music to Spotify if they don't remove the Joe Rogan Experience.

Response: LOL.

So you can see that there are many quite reasonable people out there supporting Joe, and free speech in general. Sure, there are plenty who oppose him as well: either because they just don't like him - some make crazy claims, like he's alt-right - or that he is causing harm by encouraging people not to get vaccinated. I suspect very few people would have changed from being pro- to anti-vax after listening to him, but even if there are a few, that's a small price to pay for supporting free speech.

Comment 1 (7109) by Anonymous on 2022-02-26 at 21:57:21:

You have made it clear how much you like your free speech, but what about safety for other people. Is having one person die because he didn't get vaccinated worth it?

Comment 2 (7110) by OJB on 2022-02-27 at 19:40:22:

Well everyone might have a different opinion on this, but I would say yes. We make judgements all the time which inevitably lead to deaths: we let people drive on our roads, we let them eat unhealthy food, we allow them to play sport and participate in dangerous hobbies. It's all a trade off between safety and freedom. Where do you draw the line? It's a matter of opinion, but I tend to favour the freedom rather than the safety end of the spectrum

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