Joe Rogan also apologized for racial slurs.
Spotify Pulled Down 113 Episodes
With the ongoing controversy, the streaming giant purged over 100 episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience from Spotify.
The company has received wide criticism over podcaster Joe Rogan because of the COVID misinformation provided by his show. Last month, more than 200 doctors, professionals, and scientists wrote an open letter to Spotify.
The letter demanded that Spotify impose an official policy about misinformation. But the letter focused on Rogan’s popular show, which is a well-known source of misinformation about COVID-19.
They wrote:
“We are a coalition of scientists, medical professionals, professors, and science communicators spanning a wide range of fields such as microbiology, immunology, epidemiology, and neuroscience and we are calling on Spotify to take action against the mass-misinformation events which continue to occur on its platform. With an estimated 11 million listeners per episode, JRE is the world’s largest podcast and has tremendous influence. Though Spotify has a responsibility to mitigate the spread of misinformation on its platform, the company presently has no misinformation policy.”
One of the doctors went further and said that Rogan is a menace to public health.
The letter focused on the December 31 episode with Dr. Robert Malone. He claimed to be the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology. The said episode went viral after the doctor claimed that the vaccine caused mass formation psychosis. But experts disproved this mass formation psychosis claim.
The Ultimatum
Several artists gave the platform an ultimatum. They threaten to leave the platform if they don’t remove Rogan’s show. But the platform was unperturbed by the ultimatum and sided with Rogan.
Even though more than 100 episodes from the show are now missing, those episodes are not connected to the misinformation spread by the podcast. It means that the controversial episode with Dr. Robert Malone is still available as of this publication.
However, it’s not clear whether Spotify removed those episodes or Rogan’s team purged them. It can also be a form of glitch.
The deleted episodes are randomly chosen, though. Some episodes are older while others are newer.
On Saturday, though, Joe Rogan issued an apology as videos of him surfaced showing how he used racial slurs in his past shows. Earlier this week, India.Arie pulled her catalog from the platform. She shared a video revealing Rogan’s racial slurs on various episodes of his show. She posted it to Instagram.
The host took to Instagram to apologize and said that he wasn’t trying to be racist. He added that it wasn’t his intention to offend someone for entertainment purposes. He also agreed that he should not be using slurs no matter the context.
Spotify defended its decision to include Rogan on its roster. The company said that Rogan’s podcast was important to the company’s success. Daniel Ek, Spotify’s CEO, responded “In that role, it is important to me that we don’t take on the position of being content censor while also making sure that there are rules in place and consequences for those who violate them.”
