Last night I opened Spotify and launched Neil Young’s playlist. Before it disappears. In fact, the platform decided to remove all his songs after the old rock star had intimated: either me or Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan is the king of the podcast. One with a show heard by over 10 million people at a time. And it is not a trivial product: his interviews last even three or four hours in which Joe Rogan holds the scene like certain legendary radio hosts. The fact is that he did one of interviews with a scientist who said things against vaccines about covid. Dangerous misinformation !, protested hundreds of scientists. Hence the ultimatum of Neil Young. Finished badly for now. Spotify has chosen the king of the podcast. We will see if others, with more followers, will follow Neil Young but in the meantime it is striking that the battle against fake news after social networks is extending to all platforms. Spotify said it removed over twenty thousand podcasts because they misinformed. Twenty thousand podcasts removed is a huge number: can we find out more? Who decided they should be censored? And why not Rogan?
The next battleground will be newsletters: it has been calculated that no vaxes using the Substack platform have grossed two and a half million dollars in one year; and the founders replied that they did not want to limit freedom of expression. This is a serious problem. We are fragile online, exposed to a thousand stimuli whose mechanisms we struggle to understand. But freedom of expression is also not very well. Is censorship the vaccine to regain lost trust? I don’t think so: when the pandemic ends we will have to think about it.