Episode 28: Why “Free Speech!!!” is Spotify’s Favorite Red Herring
Listen on Apple Podcasts
Listen on Spotify
Episode Description:
The Joe Rogan // Free Speech headlines this month are just symptoms of a deeper issue – and Spotify (and other tech corporations) are thrilled we’ve taken the red herring bait.
Drilling down to the root causes of our community’s most controversial issues is not easy. But to address it, instead of putting our collective energy into battling the symptoms, is our best shot at finding new peace.
In this ep, we talk about not only the Joe Rogan // Spotify news, but:
The nitty gritty details of free speech
The psychological (manipulated, algorithmic) dependence on our devices
What responsibility lies in the for-profit hands of Big Tech
and more.
Show Notes:
Optional prerequisite! Episode 13: When Hate is Monetized
“We're never going to solve problems if they're just maximising for profit, and profit is directly tied to the mass manipulation of human behaviour and beliefs. So we have to also change the fundamental governance structure. if the business model is attention, then it's not about truth, it's just about what gets attention. And making up or exaggerating or distorting facts to serve political purposes is always going to be better for getting attention than delivering the truth.” - Tristan Harris
Free speech is a right expressed by the First Amendment in the Constitution in the United States, which states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
“Freedom of speech, the press, association, assembly, and petition: This set of guarantees, protected by the First Amendment, comprises what we refer to as freedom of expression. It is the foundation of a vibrant democracy, and without it, other fundamental rights, like the right to vote, would wither away.” - ACLU
What freedom of speech does and does not protect
“Zeynep Tufekci has resisted the idea of calling the social media public squares because really their whole model is based on feeding you just information that’s really made just for you, so it’s the opposite of a public square in a way.” (Vox)
The companies are deciding, “how and where we can interact; with whom; and at what scale and visibility.” (Zeynep Tufekci)
“Conversations that used to take place in spaces that were subject to the First Amendment are now taking place in spaces that are controlled by private actors and therefore not subject to the First Amendment.” - First Amendment rights lawyer Jameel Jaffer
“… These companies have immense power to decide not just who can speak, but also who gets heard. Who can speak because they decide who gets on the platform and who doesn’t, but who can be heard because their algorithms decide what speech gets prioritized and what speech gets suppressed.” - First Amendment rights lawyer Jameel Jaffer
“There are many other groups that have been deplatformed in the past. Some have been completely driven out of the platforms by abuse, a lot of discussion around sex workers, for instance… And as we think through who gets to be online, who gets to express their voice, we have to think about the full set of decisions that have been made by these platforms around the globe and across the years.” - Disinformation Researcher Camille François
JRE attracts an estimated 11 million viewers per episode with Rogan posting four to five episodes a week that can last up to three hours long. In contrast, Young attracts nearly 6,027,000 listeners a month, according to Spotify, and Mitchell receives a little over 3,738,000 listeners.
“I think that having a meaningful field of people who are looking at it from different angles here is really important because one of the ways we tend to only focus on the handful of things that are again, like very Silicon Valley centric, very U.S. centric. And we know that these threats are global and are continuing to target civil society around the world. So I think we need to do more work… We definitely need more attention to make sure that the standards we set for ourselves are applying globally.” - Disinformation Researcher Camille François
Want to read the transcript? Here’s the blog version!
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