Time to draw the line on dangerous misinformation

When wildly popular podcaster Joe Rogan hosted Canadian firebrand Jordan Peterson recently, Peterson opened the interview with incoherent, stridently wrong ramblings about climate change.

That, unfortunately, is pretty de rigueur on Rogan’s show. Whether about climate change, COVID-19 vaccines, or lockdowns, Rogan’s open-ended approach has seen his show peddle all sorts of wild conspiracy theories.

It’s also why everyone has been talking about Neil Young’s very public request to have his music removed from Spotify, the music streaming company that also has a $100-million (U.S.) contract with Rogan to make his podcast exclusive to its platform. Young was joined by Joni Mitchell as well as Crosby, Stills and Nash, and the episode predictably spun out into a debate about censorship and free speech.

At the core of the conversation, though, is a difficult question: What role do digital platforms have in policing the content that appears on their services?

For their part, Spotify has a pretty clear answer. In a tense town-hall meeting at the company this week, CEO Daniel Ek stated the Spotify is a platform, not a publisher. Since Spotify doesn’t get to approve Rogan’s content, Ek stated, it doesn’t condone whatever ideas get espoused on the show.

It’s not a terribly convincing argument, not least because Spotify has that $100-million contract to make Rogan’s show exclusive to its platform. As Ek stated in the meeting, the decision to sign Rogan was made because the company needed to differentiate itself.

Put another way, Spotify may not explicitly approve Rogan’s content, but it certainly does so implicitly. After all, there is a marked difference between a company that merely hosts content and one that pays for it in order to promote itself.

That said, digital platforms operate in a murky grey area regarding their responsibilities. South of the border, Section 230 of the U.S. Communications Decency Act states that no digital platform should be held liable for content posted there. That crucial stipulation is what lets platforms like Twitter or Spotify host controversial or incendiary content, and for the most part, that is also true in Canada.

If one, say, takes to Facebook to commit libel, the legal onus is on you, not Facebook, and that simple fact allows digital platforms to be part of the public sphere.

Imagine if Apple had to answer for misogyny on the lyrics of albums it sells, or Twitter was liable for bigoted tweets. While of course explicit hate speech would and should be banned, policing the billions of pieces of content would not only be impossible, it would turn also turn those companies into de facto arbiters of what can be said publicly — an idea that even the most idealistic humanist would have to admit is profoundly dystopian.

The trouble is that those ideals of a pure, neutral carrier of content has been upset because of the need of those platforms to make money through differentiating themselves. Netflix, for example, has to create its own content to get people to pony up their $20 a month. Meanwhile, Spotify’s Ek says of its deal with Rogan and the resulting grey area: “we’re defining an entirely new space of tech and media. We’re a very different kind of company.”

Translation: That’s tech CEOspeak for “we want to have our cake and eat it too.”

True, Spotify has made some adjustments to its misinformation policy, and before the Rogan deal, it removed some old episodes of the show. Still, Rogan’s audience numbers in the tens of millions, and Spotify didn’t budge in response to Young’s request.

Free expression is important as an ideal, but so is a commitment to truth and intellectual rigour — and in siding with Rogan, Spotify is committing only to the former while actively harming the latter.

What then are we to do in a society in which blatantly false information finds not just a platform, but popularity, and in which we also value the notion of the free exchange of ideas?

For better or worse, it seems our only recourse here is the state — specifically, that there should be carefully tailored rules about the dissemination of plainly false, socially harmful information.

Those rules will have to be extremely constrained, both in scope but also how they are applied, perhaps with stipulations related to repeated offences. Think, for example, of a radio show in the 1960s telling listeners it’s OK for young people to be gay — the last thing you would want to do would be institute rules that would prevent genuinely transformative or countercultural ideas.

Canada is about to embark on its own discussion of whether and where those kinds of lines should be drawn as the ruling Liberals have now tabled Bill C-11, which may make platform companies like Spotify subject to oversight by the CRTC.

Deciding how to walk that line between expression and constraint is an unenviable task. But it is a decision we must eventually arrive at — lest false and misleading information disseminated by large online platforms pollute our public sphere even more.