[hagy]

I agree that Spotify has the legal right to stop distributing any content they find objectionable. Anyone arguing that Spotify’s action is a first amendment violation is simply wrong. A private entity, like Spotify, can decide what content to distribute at their own discretion. I don’t think many people are making this argument.

Instead, I think many of us are arguing that Spotify shouldn’t exercise that option just because of an outraged online mob. That includes those of us that aren’t particular fans of Rogan and wouldn’t be affected if we couldn’t consume his content anymore. Many of us are arguing that as a general principal; don’t give in to a short-lived and irrational angry mob.

I am arguing for Spotify and other content distributors to ignore angry mobs because I worry that eventually such a mob will come for something I do value. E.g., I listen to plenty of music that includes gratuitous levels of profanity. I imagine that such music greatly offends many people, chiefly culturally conservative prudes. Should such an online mob form and demand Spotify stop distributing some of my favorite music then I hope Spotify resists that mob.

Maybe one day I’ll even be a member of such a mob demanding that some platform stop distributing something that offends my sensibilities. While my emotions of hate and outrage may cloud my rational judgment, I hope the platform will have the courage to tell me and my compatriots to pound sand. If we don’t like the content, then we don’t have to consume it.

*Edited to fix a mistake as pointed out in a reply.

[roamerz]

>chiefly culturally conservative prude

The difference in me (chiefly culturally conservative prude) and the liberal cancel culture is that I won’t try to silence someone’s choices based on my values. You may listen to whatever you want and I hope you get enjoyment out of it. I support your freedoms and a lot of good men have died to protect them.

[ninkendo]

The difference between you and the “cancel culture” is that you are a real person who exists, and “cancel culture” is an emergent phenomenon that happens on social media. People complaining about cancel culture is like people complaining about traffic jams. There’s no nefarious person in charge who’s trying to “cancel” things, it’s just lots and lots and lots of people and a tendency to overreact to stuff.

[tsol]

I think we all know what he means. He means the liberal equivalent to the "socially conservative prude". Which certainly does exist.

(Also this is only tangentially related but why is being prude a bad thing? I had a female friend in high school that would get insulted for being too prude. I don't think people really realize the way these concepts get applied in reality. People are allowed to be prude just as they're allowed to be libertines.)

[gruez]

>There’s no nefarious person in charge who’s trying to “cancel” things, it’s just lots and lots and lots of people and a tendency to overreact to stuff.

There isn't? Are there not people calling for someone to be fired/resign because of some action they did?

[ninkendo]

It’s not the same people every time. People tend to want to out-outrage one another sometimes and it sometimes it leads certain people to call for boycotting/etc, and then sometimes those movements pick up steam as people try to be “early” to a given outrage cycle.

Nobody’s calling the shots here… nobody went and decided “aim the twitter outrage cannon at Joe Rogan, he ran afoul of the Cancel Culture and must atone.” It’s just a phenomenon that happens due to the tendency of humans on social media to amplify outrage rather than ignore it.

[hombre_fatal]

I wouldn’t be so sure: https://twitter.com/wokal_distance/status/149022042327069900...

The idea that nobody organizes to push around political muscle seems pretty naive, like suggesting that there are no guerilla ads on reddit.

[redbar0n]

Hence the term «culture»…

It extends far beyond social media.

[jakelazaroff]

> People complaining about cancel culture is like people complaining about traffic jams.

This is a great analogy.

[Grustaf]

It's not an emergent phenomenon that "just happens". It's very strongly pushed by liberal media outlets.

[ninkendo]

Every "liberal media outlet" I've seen tends to just regurgitate opinions they see on Twitter, so I don't really understand what "pushed" means in your context. It seems more like they're amplifying existing outrage than anything.

[Grustaf]

Do you actually think channels like CNN get their left leaning bias from reading twitter, rather than their owners? And I suppose fox gets its bias from listening to Joe Rogan?

[chillwaves]

Who are the liberal owners of CNN? I thought they were all just trying to make money.

Rupert Murdoch, on the other hand, has a history of running news at a loss to push his angle.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/jun/11/rupert-murdoch...

[ninkendo]

> Do you actually think channels like CNN get their left leaning bias from reading twitter, rather than their owners?

That's not my claim. I'm claiming that if you actually watch CNN, they tend to literally put a camera to a big computer monitor and show you a bunch of people's tweets. I'm not talking about bias/etc here, I'm talking about how they literally feature tweets as part of their news coverage.

Of the typical stories on CNN that one would qualify as "cancel culture", they typically go something like: "<Celebrity A> said a controversial thing on Twitter! Let's take a look at some of the reactions..." etc etc. Their coverage seems to be focused on "what do the people think of X", all the damned time. Yes, this makes CNN quite useless as a news organization.

[chillwaves]

Like the war on Christmas?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/style/starbucks-gay-agend...

[edgyquant]

This is hilarious. Social conservatives invented cancel culture and used their influence to control the media we watched until very recently. Does no one remember the Dixie Chicks being made irrelevant because they critiqued Bush? No what happened is that the population is no longer majority conservative and the tools employed by them are now under the control of social liberals and they (you) can’t stand it.

Nice try though pretending history starts at some arbitrary line you can then use to critique. Conservatives are just getting a taste of their own medicine.

[pokey00]

Well, that's a pretty poor example to use to try to make your point. The Dixie Chicks (a country music group with a socially conservative leaning fanbase) went to a foreign country and decided to shit on their president for whatever the early 2000's equivalence of 'woke points' was. Europe was wildly anti-Bush at the time, so I'm sure it played well over there.

Their American fanbase (yanno, the MASSIVE group of people that enabled the Dixie Chicks' success... it sure didn't come from European audiences) turned on them because their values were obviously different and I guess Natalie Maines couldn't grasp that.

I don't have any evidence, but I'm leaning towards thinking that the people calling for Joe Rogan's cancellation aren't his main fanbase. That's the common thread with today's "social liberal" influence on media- people that are complete non-consumers of whatever winds up in the crosshairs just go to fucking war nowadays against whatever they've decided is offensive.

[9935c101ab17a66]

> went to a foreign country

Why on earth does this matter in any way?

> shit on their president

Uh, this is what they said:

> Just so you know, we're on the good side with y'all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we're ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.

Not exactly “shitting” on him is it?

Anecdotally, I think joe Rogan has lost a TON of fans over the last few years. There is no better example of this than the joe rogan subreddit. It used to be a place for fans to gather, but now he regularly gets roasted and fairly criticized. And if you’ve actually watched the JRE over the last few years, his podcast has changed SIGNIFICANTLY (for the worse imo). There’s no better example of this than the clip from 2020 that was circulating this week, where he basically calls antivaxxers bozos.

He used to have a kooky, interesting perspective and I appreciated how he would approach topics with an open mind. Even if I didn’t agree with his guests, he’d ask decent questions and confront the egregious shit. He doesn’t do that anymore. His guests are just people that believe the same fringe, unsupported contrarian conspiracies.

[edgyquant]

It’s an example, and not a poor one. Pretty much all media was heavily censored with a conservative bias until the last decade or so.

[RupertHandjob]

It is a poor one, if the guys explanation is right. Joe Rogans fanbase is not turning on him. They understand that he will have guests that not everybody likes. I skip the episodes that I don't find interesting. The pressure is coming from the out side mob that has never listened a episode and going with the sound bites from multi hour episode.

American main stream news distribute fake new very often, but I don't see much uproar about that in the cancel culture circles.

https://rumble.com/vtunof-the-media-outlets-demanding-joe-ro...

Glenn Greenwald made a good video about. Breaking Points, Kyle Kulinski and Tim Pool has talked about this issue. CNN, MSNBC, etc. can say outright lies and nobody wants them to be cancelled. Instead they are being promoted on Youtube. Does "Horse dewormer" ring a bell or "Russia gate"? Both of them are lies period.

[edgyquant]

Writing off critics of Rogan as those who’ve never listened to him is dishonest and bad faith debating. I was a big Rogan fan prior to 2017 when his guest pool become predominantly right wing (as did his talking points.)

[tsol]

Cancel culture has been going on since humans lived in societies. It's strange to try to pin it on one political party, as if there was a time when humans didn't try to silence those they considered to spread dangerous ideas

[sangnoir]

I'm old enough to remember the Dixie Chicks being cancelled by conservertives for daring to question certain foreign policies concerning the middle east. Ofcourse, it wasn't called "Cancel Culture" then, it was good ol' fashioned patriotic boycott to get them off the airwaves.

The use of language in culture wars are fascinating, I really wish I studied deeply enough in the humanities to really grok it. To my laymen eyes, there are a lot of evolving shibboleths[1], and verbal (or mental) gymnastics to variably identify an activity subjectively based on where on the political spectrum the perpetrator (or poor victim). People are really insist the other side is completely unreasonable, and is to blame for engaging in the culture war.

1. e.g. cancel culture, BIPoC, woke-ism, gender pronouns, virtue-signaling, &tc

[Grustaf]

You mean "The Chicks"? They changed the name because the left felt it was racist to use the word Dixie.

[politicslol]

Joe Rogan is not being censored for his political beliefs. There are many conservative podcasts on Spotify. He is being censored for medical disinformation. If you've listened to JRE over the last 2 years, he regularly (a) disparages the research and conclusions of medical professionals and (b) presents his own anecdotal views as fact. It is not "I think COVID is X", it is "COVID is X". This is neither in the realm of opinion nor in the realm of politics. This is a debate on whose medical authority to trust.

I wish people would have the integrity to speak about the situation honestly.

Discussions with conservatives on issues like this inevitably result in every topic being badly grafted and transposed into a discussion on "left-wing culture". The issue-at-hand is rarely, if ever, the point. Reading conservative commentary on this issue, one would believe that he was banned from Spotify for stating that he believed that small government was preferable to big government. It's completely and utterly fucking disingenuous.

[WithinReason]

> I wish people would have the integrity to speak about the situation honestly.

None of the removed episodes were about COVID. Actually, only 1 removed episode is from the last 3 years.

[revnode]

As others have pointed out, this isn't about COVID. That said, the notion that some topics cannot be discussed or cannot be discussed in a certain way is not only wrong, it is outrageous.

[politicslol]

Yeah, the original post has no context, I assumed they were deleted due to pressure from Neil Young & co about COVID disinformation.

It appears that they were deleted instead due to his use of racial slurs. Which, I guess, is a "gotcha".

With your regards to your second point, I do not know what you are referencing. This goes back to my earlier point. Are you saying that it's outrageous that Spotify would remove podcasts containing racial slurs? Or have you pushed aside the topic-at-hand to discuss some social issue outside of this topic?

[s1artibartfast]

As mentioned none of the episodes were about covid for medical information. I major portion where conversations with other comedians that may have touched on culturally edgy topics. It's like they ran a transcript filter for words like Islam

[scrubs]

Agree - 100%. There's guys who are payed money to yap all day --- a lot not totally but a lot --- of the talent they interview not Joe is what brings in the listeners --- and that's fine.

Now,

- venture into messing with kids

- screwing with public health

- racism

and ... what were you going to stand on? the serious respect you plowed being the "in guy" for the last 15 mins of fame talking BS? Nobody cares that much. I don't. You're in decline now or out. There's a built in and pre-understood fungibility to the whole business, which puts a smile on my face.

Whether it's Trump, the I-man, or Howard stern a lot of media people like them b/c the bring in viewers. And they are the first to toss them out when the line is crossed. I think Imus (I-man) of "Imus in the morning" learned that in a direct way. So let's not totally dismiss the platform behind the host even if Spotify is OK here.

[olivermarks]

Do you mean 'distributing' rather than 'disrupting'? [first line & paragraph].

I'm sure Spotify are under colossal pressure to delete historical perceived heretical 'content' on their platform in order to keep their paying customers calm during an unprecedented era of US anti free A1 speech and hysterical media driven witch hunts.

I also think their long term prospects, as societal fashions change and (I hope) reason prevails, will not be good as they will be associated with a very dark period in history. IBM survived this after WWII but it took a lot of PR and having the media on their side.

[hagy]

Good catch. Will correct the mistake. Thanks!

Agree that hopefully Spotify can resist calls to stop distributing content that other users find objectionable. As you point out, fashion will change and hopefully it does so in a way that shuns calls for censorship.