7 ms·

Of course they are free to do what they want. But if they do something unethical, like removing content for political reasons, I'm also free to criticize them a

by Hermel 5y ago

Of course they are free to do what they want. But if they do something unethical, like removing content for political reasons, I'm also free to criticize them and for example demand a refund if they lured me into a subscription by claiming I would be able to listen to Joe Rogan. Also, you are making wild assumptions about the contract between Joe Rogan and Spotify. Maybe there's a clause in there that they will not only license his shows, but also make them available to their users? In that case, removing the episodes would be a breach of contract. I hope you understand a little better now.

newswasboring 5y ago
> But if they do something unethical, like removing content for political reasons How is this unethical?
- influx 5y ago
- mordymoop 5y ago
  This is a very common question, and understandably so. It can be surprisingly hard to defend a general principle on ethical grounds. Principles are justified by observed regularities. Good principles do not necessarily lead to correct actions in 100% of circumstances. The principle of “don’t interfere with the free exchange of ideas” is one such example where it is particularly hard to see the justification. The consequences of speech suppression are usually subtle —- how do you quantify the impact of a conversation that didn't happen? And at the same time, the consequences of allowing hatespeech or misinformation are usually not subtle, but rather immediate and relatively obvious. I think we’re actually lucky because the Joe Rohan example does contain examples of good justifications. For the past two years, Rogan was openly discussing politically inconvenient inconsistencies, contradictions, and in some cases retroactively apparent lies by the establishment. It is good to know when your leaders are incompetent, when they are lying, or even when they have made a mistake and never taken responsibility for it! It is good that these conversations happened and good that people know this information. But even if we can see that this is good, it’s still one of those abstract good-for-society things that is hard to quantify and hard to weigh against the consequences of its counterfactual non-existence. It is thus almost impossible to balance against the harms of, for example, supporting vaccine skepticism. But that’s not an argument for suppression, merely an acknowledgement that this is hard to think about clearly. But it is a fallacy to say: Joe Rogan’s vaccine skepticism is getting people killed, therefor he should be silenced. The reason is that living in the sort of society that would silence Joe Rogan also gets people killed. The deaths are just abstract deaths. Put it this way: image we get into a war in five years because Rogan and all the other independent voices like him have been successfully soft-pressured into not talking about the downsides, while the mainstream propaganda mouthpieces have been selling the war hard. Thus, we create a concrete terrible outcome because we allowed a culture of speech suppression. Unfortunately, even if that does happen, it will not be obvious that speech suppression led to war, because, again, general principles tend to have more subtle but far-reaching consequences. There are also well-known edge cases where speech suppression is probably obviously the right thing to do. I personally think that the genome for smallpox should never have been published, because try as I might, I can’t imagine a scenario where the harms of suppressing the specific knowledge outweighs the possible (even likely) consequence of its dispersement. You can have a principle while being cognizant that tradeoffs can be valid. Again, though, the reason why free expression is weirdly difficult to defend, is that the harms of “bad” free expression are usually immediate and clear, while the harms of speech suppression are abstract and distant.
  - nradov 5y ago
    When the smallpox genome was first published about 30 years ago we didn't have commercial laboratories that could synthesize a virus based on a sequence. So scientists probably didn't anticipate the current risks. At this point it's too late to censor.
  - dahart 5y ago
    This is an amazing rationalization that doesn’t seem to answer the question of why private companies are being unethical if they exercise their freedom to choose what they publish. Nor have you established that choice in the private commercial publishing industry amounts to “silencing”. There is a reason that freedom of speech laws in the US do not apply to commercial speech. > The deaths are just abstract deaths. False. At least 5.7 million actual people have died from Covid. Probably many more. Your counter is abstract and somewhat straw man, while the pandemic is a fairly specific and real public health crisis that more or less all public health experts agree requires active management.
    - mordymoop 5y ago
      You’ve misunderstood and somehow taken me to be saying the inverse of what I actually wrote, so thoroughly that it is difficult to see how you could be making a good faith criticism, though it is always possible that I just wrote my post very poorly. What I said was that the deaths caused by speech suppression are abstract while the deaths caused by speech acts can be very clear and obvious. Because the harms of speech suppression are hard to see, it is harder to argue against speech suppression. In this case the speech acts related to vaccine denialism can be clearly argued to have resulted in deaths, while it is harder to argue for the danger of deaths and other harms caused indirectly by speech suppression. Though now that I think on it, there was suppression of anti-Iraq-war speech in the early 2000s. Maybe if those perspectives had been more widely heard, that war wouldn’t have happened. In any case, what you do in your last paragraph is merely an example of the thing I’m talking about. Misunderstanding someone’s argument and calling that misunderstanding a strawman is itself a strawman. 5.7 million deaths on one side of the ledger, okay. Well, the establishment was wrong about masking early in the pandemic, so how many more lives would have been lost if pro-masking voices had been suppressed then?
- dnissley 5y ago
  Agree that it's not unethical in any usual sense of the word. "Ill-advised" is how I think of these situations -- likely to produce unintended negative effects down the line.
- Hermel 5y ago
  It's unethical if you believe that people should be free in expressing their opinions. (Yes, I know that freedom of speech in the US constitution concerns the government and not companies, but I'm talking about freedom of speech as a general value. I find it unethical to suppress someone's ability to freely voice their opinions regardless of whether the government or a private entity does it.)
  - hnarn 5y ago
    > It's unethical if you believe that people should be free in expressing their opinions. No it's not, because free speech does not equal the right to be heard. > I find it unethical to suppress someone's ability to freely voice their opinions Can you really not come up with a single example of when you feel a group, entity, corporation, whatever has any right to remove a person from their platform or premise because of what they are saying? Really? This is "unethical", categorically?
  - newswasboring 5y ago
    You have a right to free speech, agreed as a general value, but you don't have a right to my megaphone.
lazide 5y ago
It sounds more like you’re angry that someone is refusing to publish on the platform they own something you personally politically associate with? Which hey, I get. But they are refusing to publish it because they don’t want to be associated with it anymore, and they bought exclusive rights to it from producer, so… And I don’t see Joe Rogan saying he is in a hurry to return the money Spotify gave him for this exclusive licensing deal either. The only real way I can think to ‘solve’ that problem would be to make it illegal to do exclusive licensing deals for content. Which I personally would be behind (it is also at the root of the whole streaming provider wars, among many many others), but has very far reaching consequences intellectual property wise.
- sebzim4500 5y ago
  What could be done, is to pass a law saying that exclusivity contracts are only enforceable when the content is actually being made available. I doubt there would be any real support for such a law by anyone who matters though.
  - lazide 5y ago
    True, though that could also happen with the right court case. A bunch of right to repair related stuff, ‘right of fair use’, etc. has been won that way. Intellectual property law has always had an element of ‘society gives you these protections with the idea and understanding that it makes EVERYONE wealthier in the long run’. There is no NATURAL RIGHT (as in, something that will happen unless interfered with) to exclusive anything related to knowledge. If anything, it requires extraordinary work and legal protections for it to be even a potential thing, and that is becoming more and more the case. To get that protection from Society (without it just being a naked theft from everyone anyway), there should be some exchange or actual improvement for the rest of society. Saying that at a minimum if you have exclusive rights to sell or distribute something, you must be selling or distributing it at a rate that allows normal people to access it (there is the tough part - how do you define that!) or you lose exclusivity and anyone can distribute copies for free - seems perfectly fair. It also encourages archiving and retention of our history, which would be a good sell for overall society I imagine.
chillwaves 5y ago
None of this is censorship.
- gregors 5y ago
  This is the textbook definition of the word. There may or may not be a good reason for it - but the cause of it is separate from the action.
shirly88 5y ago
Damogran6 5y ago
Your subscription is churn. Every decision they make has net positive and negative effects in the numbers, but you saying ‘You promised my X but gave me Y’ is table stakes when dealing with subscription umbers as big as spotify has. They probably did the calculus and determined they’d lose LESS people if they scrubbed the catalog than if they didn’t. It’s not a political statement to them.
smus 5y ago
It's unethical to publish content that promotes white supremacists, even indirectly. Don't see how it's unethical to censor it though
- tastyfreeze 5y ago
  Rogan has never promoted white supremacists. That is slander by the media.
- Supermancho 5y ago
  > It's unethical to publish content that promotes white supremacists I dont understand how you can come to that conclusion. eg A doctor saving the life of a white supremacist. Ethics are differentiated by profession. It is not altigether clear, which ethical considerations Spotify is bound by and apply to this situation.
  - smus 5y ago
    You think a doctor saving the life of a white supremacist is the same as publishing content that promotes white supremacy? Huh, I guess that's certainly one way to understand the world
    - Supermancho 5y ago
      > You think a doctor saving the life of a white supremacist is the same as publishing content that promotes white supremacy? I do not. That assertion is unrelated to the topic, so Im not sure why you imagined it. To be clear, I have implied the consequences are equal or, worse, probably multiplicative...in the context of the theoretical consideration you posited. > It's unethical to publish content that promotes white supremacists Again, how does this relate to any ethics that applies to Spotify?
      - smus 5y ago
        You are a poor communicator. When did you first ask how my quote relates to Spotify? Why did you post an unrelated hypothetical under my comment?
srg0 5y ago
I’m the opposite. I paid for Spotify subscription long before Joe Rogan deal, and never listened to any of his podcasts. I learned that they’re controversial after Neil Young was pulled from Spotify. I guess the message was delivered, and I actually considered cancelling my family subscription and switching to something else. I’m happy about their decision, and will remain their customer.
- Dwelve 5y ago
  Just so we are clear. You never heard to a single episode, but because woke idiots on twitter said something you considered canceling the service? Like, you were going to cancel because someone said Joe Rogan did something controversial?
  - srg0 5y ago
    Just so we’re clear, I don’t consider neither Neil Young nor hundreds of medical professionals to be idiots. I read the open letter too, and formed an opinion about what kind of podcast is Joe Rogan’s. So at this point what matters is that Spotify made a deal with Joe Rogan, and thus Spotify is also responsible for whatever he fancies to broadcast. As the only way to vote in this matter is my wallet, I considered cancelling the subscription. If I did I would also try to convince other people to do the same. And frankly, Spotify was a better service without podcasts.
    - RupertHandjob 5y ago
      Just to be clear. You are ok with child rapist R Kelly and women beater Chris Brown being there, but some guy talking to a doctor/scientist is too much?
    - jandorn 5y ago
      Fair enough. So what opinion did you formed on JRE? As someone who listen to bunch of his podcasts before I will be able to say is your opinion accurate.
    - nradov 5y ago

by Hermel 5y ago

newswasboring 5y ago

> But if they do something unethical, like removing content for political reasons How is this unethical?

influx 5y ago
mordymoop 5y ago
This is a very common question, and understandably so. It can be surprisingly hard to defend a general principle on ethical grounds. Principles are justified by observed regularities. Good principles do not necessarily lead to correct actions in 100% of circumstances. The principle of “don’t interfere with the free exchange of ideas” is one such example where it is particularly hard to see the justification. The consequences of speech suppression are usually subtle —- how do you quantify the impact of a conversation that didn't happen? And at the same time, the consequences of allowing hatespeech or misinformation are usually not subtle, but rather immediate and relatively obvious. I think we’re actually lucky because the Joe Rohan example does contain examples of good justifications. For the past two years, Rogan was openly discussing politically inconvenient inconsistencies, contradictions, and in some cases retroactively apparent lies by the establishment. It is good to know when your leaders are incompetent, when they are lying, or even when they have made a mistake and never taken responsibility for it! It is good that these conversations happened and good that people know this information. But even if we can see that this is good, it’s still one of those abstract good-for-society things that is hard to quantify and hard to weigh against the consequences of its counterfactual non-existence. It is thus almost impossible to balance against the harms of, for example, supporting vaccine skepticism. But that’s not an argument for suppression, merely an acknowledgement that this is hard to think about clearly. But it is a fallacy to say: Joe Rogan’s vaccine skepticism is getting people killed, therefor he should be silenced. The reason is that living in the sort of society that would silence Joe Rogan also gets people killed. The deaths are just abstract deaths. Put it this way: image we get into a war in five years because Rogan and all the other independent voices like him have been successfully soft-pressured into not talking about the downsides, while the mainstream propaganda mouthpieces have been selling the war hard. Thus, we create a concrete terrible outcome because we allowed a culture of speech suppression. Unfortunately, even if that does happen, it will not be obvious that speech suppression led to war, because, again, general principles tend to have more subtle but far-reaching consequences. There are also well-known edge cases where speech suppression is probably obviously the right thing to do. I personally think that the genome for smallpox should never have been published, because try as I might, I can’t imagine a scenario where the harms of suppressing the specific knowledge outweighs the possible (even likely) consequence of its dispersement. You can have a principle while being cognizant that tradeoffs can be valid. Again, though, the reason why free expression is weirdly difficult to defend, is that the harms of “bad” free expression are usually immediate and clear, while the harms of speech suppression are abstract and distant.
- nradov 5y ago
  When the smallpox genome was first published about 30 years ago we didn't have commercial laboratories that could synthesize a virus based on a sequence. So scientists probably didn't anticipate the current risks. At this point it's too late to censor.
- dahart 5y ago
  This is an amazing rationalization that doesn’t seem to answer the question of why private companies are being unethical if they exercise their freedom to choose what they publish. Nor have you established that choice in the private commercial publishing industry amounts to “silencing”. There is a reason that freedom of speech laws in the US do not apply to commercial speech. > The deaths are just abstract deaths. False. At least 5.7 million actual people have died from Covid. Probably many more. Your counter is abstract and somewhat straw man, while the pandemic is a fairly specific and real public health crisis that more or less all public health experts agree requires active management.
  - mordymoop 5y ago
    You’ve misunderstood and somehow taken me to be saying the inverse of what I actually wrote, so thoroughly that it is difficult to see how you could be making a good faith criticism, though it is always possible that I just wrote my post very poorly. What I said was that the deaths caused by speech suppression are abstract while the deaths caused by speech acts can be very clear and obvious. Because the harms of speech suppression are hard to see, it is harder to argue against speech suppression. In this case the speech acts related to vaccine denialism can be clearly argued to have resulted in deaths, while it is harder to argue for the danger of deaths and other harms caused indirectly by speech suppression. Though now that I think on it, there was suppression of anti-Iraq-war speech in the early 2000s. Maybe if those perspectives had been more widely heard, that war wouldn’t have happened. In any case, what you do in your last paragraph is merely an example of the thing I’m talking about. Misunderstanding someone’s argument and calling that misunderstanding a strawman is itself a strawman. 5.7 million deaths on one side of the ledger, okay. Well, the establishment was wrong about masking early in the pandemic, so how many more lives would have been lost if pro-masking voices had been suppressed then?
dnissley 5y ago
Agree that it's not unethical in any usual sense of the word. "Ill-advised" is how I think of these situations -- likely to produce unintended negative effects down the line.
Hermel 5y ago
It's unethical if you believe that people should be free in expressing their opinions. (Yes, I know that freedom of speech in the US constitution concerns the government and not companies, but I'm talking about freedom of speech as a general value. I find it unethical to suppress someone's ability to freely voice their opinions regardless of whether the government or a private entity does it.)
- hnarn 5y ago
  > It's unethical if you believe that people should be free in expressing their opinions. No it's not, because free speech does not equal the right to be heard. > I find it unethical to suppress someone's ability to freely voice their opinions Can you really not come up with a single example of when you feel a group, entity, corporation, whatever has any right to remove a person from their platform or premise because of what they are saying? Really? This is "unethical", categorically?
- newswasboring 5y ago
  You have a right to free speech, agreed as a general value, but you don't have a right to my megaphone.

lazide 5y ago

It sounds more like you’re angry that someone is refusing to publish on the platform they own something you personally politically associate with? Which hey, I get. But they are refusing to publish it because they don’t want to be associated with it anymore, and they bought exclusive rights to it from producer, so… And I don’t see Joe Rogan saying he is in a hurry to return the money Spotify gave him for this exclusive licensing deal either. The only real way I can think to ‘solve’ that problem would be to make it illegal to do exclusive licensing deals for content. Which I personally would be behind (it is also at the root of the whole streaming provider wars, among many many others), but has very far reaching consequences intellectual property wise.

sebzim4500 5y ago
What could be done, is to pass a law saying that exclusivity contracts are only enforceable when the content is actually being made available. I doubt there would be any real support for such a law by anyone who matters though.
- lazide 5y ago
  True, though that could also happen with the right court case. A bunch of right to repair related stuff, ‘right of fair use’, etc. has been won that way. Intellectual property law has always had an element of ‘society gives you these protections with the idea and understanding that it makes EVERYONE wealthier in the long run’. There is no NATURAL RIGHT (as in, something that will happen unless interfered with) to exclusive anything related to knowledge. If anything, it requires extraordinary work and legal protections for it to be even a potential thing, and that is becoming more and more the case. To get that protection from Society (without it just being a naked theft from everyone anyway), there should be some exchange or actual improvement for the rest of society. Saying that at a minimum if you have exclusive rights to sell or distribute something, you must be selling or distributing it at a rate that allows normal people to access it (there is the tough part - how do you define that!) or you lose exclusivity and anyone can distribute copies for free - seems perfectly fair. It also encourages archiving and retention of our history, which would be a good sell for overall society I imagine.

chillwaves 5y ago

None of this is censorship.

gregors 5y ago
This is the textbook definition of the word. There may or may not be a good reason for it - but the cause of it is separate from the action.

shirly88 5y ago

Damogran6 5y ago

Your subscription is churn. Every decision they make has net positive and negative effects in the numbers, but you saying ‘You promised my X but gave me Y’ is table stakes when dealing with subscription umbers as big as spotify has. They probably did the calculus and determined they’d lose LESS people if they scrubbed the catalog than if they didn’t. It’s not a political statement to them.

smus 5y ago

It's unethical to publish content that promotes white supremacists, even indirectly. Don't see how it's unethical to censor it though

tastyfreeze 5y ago
Rogan has never promoted white supremacists. That is slander by the media.
Supermancho 5y ago
> It's unethical to publish content that promotes white supremacists I dont understand how you can come to that conclusion. eg A doctor saving the life of a white supremacist. Ethics are differentiated by profession. It is not altigether clear, which ethical considerations Spotify is bound by and apply to this situation.
- smus 5y ago
  You think a doctor saving the life of a white supremacist is the same as publishing content that promotes white supremacy? Huh, I guess that's certainly one way to understand the world
  - Supermancho 5y ago
    > You think a doctor saving the life of a white supremacist is the same as publishing content that promotes white supremacy? I do not. That assertion is unrelated to the topic, so Im not sure why you imagined it. To be clear, I have implied the consequences are equal or, worse, probably multiplicative...in the context of the theoretical consideration you posited. > It's unethical to publish content that promotes white supremacists Again, how does this relate to any ethics that applies to Spotify?
    - smus 5y ago
      You are a poor communicator. When did you first ask how my quote relates to Spotify? Why did you post an unrelated hypothetical under my comment?

srg0 5y ago

I’m the opposite. I paid for Spotify subscription long before Joe Rogan deal, and never listened to any of his podcasts. I learned that they’re controversial after Neil Young was pulled from Spotify. I guess the message was delivered, and I actually considered cancelling my family subscription and switching to something else. I’m happy about their decision, and will remain their customer.

Dwelve 5y ago
Just so we are clear. You never heard to a single episode, but because woke idiots on twitter said something you considered canceling the service? Like, you were going to cancel because someone said Joe Rogan did something controversial?
- srg0 5y ago
  Just so we’re clear, I don’t consider neither Neil Young nor hundreds of medical professionals to be idiots. I read the open letter too, and formed an opinion about what kind of podcast is Joe Rogan’s. So at this point what matters is that Spotify made a deal with Joe Rogan, and thus Spotify is also responsible for whatever he fancies to broadcast. As the only way to vote in this matter is my wallet, I considered cancelling the subscription. If I did I would also try to convince other people to do the same. And frankly, Spotify was a better service without podcasts.
  - RupertHandjob 5y ago
    Just to be clear. You are ok with child rapist R Kelly and women beater Chris Brown being there, but some guy talking to a doctor/scientist is too much?
  - jandorn 5y ago
    Fair enough. So what opinion did you formed on JRE? As someone who listen to bunch of his podcasts before I will be able to say is your opinion accurate.
  - nradov 5y ago