Spotify's Misinformation Crisis
It goes beyond Joe Rogan.
As you’ve no doubt realize by now, Spotify is dangerous to society. They have sold their souls, propagating both Nickelback music and life-threatening COVID misinformation for years — an effective safe harbor for the world’s’ most harmful digital content.
You don’t need me to tell you this, of course. Virtually every respected news outlet and public figure has been hounding Spotify for its misinformation problem, spurred by complaints from highly decorated veterinarians and the evergreen musicians Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. And many are taking their business to more ethical megaconglomerates, namely Amazon and Apple. With this post, I might as well be speaking into an echo chamber. But I too am overcome with the fundamental human need to earn my virtuosity stripes by decrying the company from the top of my lungs. So I will document some lesser known instances of Spotify amplifying the voices of shameless liars that seek to undermine public health (lest they get away with it uncancelled).
3. Barack Obama
“If you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” was a pledge made by President Obama on no less than 37 occasions, a key part of his push for sweeping healthcare reform as he sought to reassure Americans their insurance coverage wouldn’t be disrupted. As PolitiFact points out in an article christening the claim their 2013 “Lie of the Year,” upwards of 4 million people received cancellation notices from their insurance companies. And it wasn’t exactly a surprise to policymakers either — the entire point of the law was to change the rules governing the health insurance market, including what plans could and couldn’t be offered. To cap it off, Obama had the audacity to claim that he was saying something else the entire time!
With his proven track record of spreading health misinformation across the country, it’s scandalous that Obama has a creator account on Spotify at all. Yet the company decided to ink a multiyear deal with the Obamas to produce and voice podcasts exclusive to the platform, including a series of conversations with Bruce Springsteen (whose lead guitarist is also protesting Spotify over Rogan). It’s only a matter of time before Mr. Liar of the Year strikes again and puts public health at risk, so why let it happen? The only solution is to send Obama himself a Spotify cancellation notice — whether he likes his podcasts or not.
2. Neil Young and Joni Mitchell
Yes, you read that right. As it turns out, both of these modern day Martin Luthers have a dodgy relationship with the truth as well.
Writing for The Daily Beast, Louis Anslow reminds us that Neil Young has been an vocal opponent of GMOs over the past decade, spearheading a movement that has frustrated efforts to distribute Vitamin A-infused rice to developing nations. Much like anti-vaxxers, Young rejects the scientific consensus on GMOs as safe, accusing scientists of conspiring with industry to obscure “the terrible diseases and all of the things that are happening.” Worse still, he personally profited from misinformation by releasing an album called “The Monsanto Years” (and accompanying film) touting his anti-science stance. As Anslow points out, the Young-backed “anti-biotechnology movement helped lay the foundations of the anti-COVID vaccine movement today” by sowing distrust in safe, lab engineered technologies.
Young is also a proven homophobe, sharing anti-gay slurs and dangerous misinformation about HIV/AIDS at a time when the disease was ripping through the gay community. Commenting on then-President Reagan’s policies in an interview, he offered:
“You go to a supermarket and you see a f****t behind the fuckin’ cash register, you don’t want him to handle your potatoes.”
Some people argue that this disgusting tirade was a long time ago, but the passage of time has never before stopped our nation’s finest cancel culture warriors serving us — why should it now? Besides, Neil Young hasn’t apologized in all that time. In response to criticism, Joe Rogan has clarified that he thinks vaccines are safe and vowed to perform more research before speaking on important issues, and it’s not like he’s getting a pass.
And on that note, neither should Joni Mitchell. She dressed up in blackface for an album cover and to this day remains adamant that it was acceptable because “I have experienced being a black guy on several occasions.” This sounds like medical effing misinformation if I’ve ever heard it.
She also maintains that she suffers from “Morgellons”, claiming that it is a “weird, incurable disease that seems like it’s from outer space” that causes “fibers in a variety of colors” to flower from her skin “like mushrooms after a rainstorm.” Morgellons has been roundly declared by the scientific community to be a non-existent medical condition, with experts suggesting that self-diagnosed patients are instead suffering from psychological delusions where they think bugs are burrowing into their skin. It was first “diagnosed” by a stay-at-home mom using an $8 toy microscope from RadioShack, before it proliferated into a mass, Internet-fueled hysteria and conspiracy theory involving aliens and a government cover-up. Not one to shy away from medical misinformation, Mitchell pledged to the L.A. Times to battle the medical community on it, garnering her the title of “the illness’s most famous flag-bearer.”
So in all honesty, who even knows if the racist, homophobic, delusional, anti-science duo were removed from Spotify of their own accord? Maybe the company decided they had enough of the misinformation crisis plaguing the world, and decided to send a message to bad actors like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. If you wouldn’t trust Joni’s psychofungal hands to handle your potatoes, you can’t trust her to remain on Spotify, as the old saying goes.
1. Fauci, Surgeon General, and Top U.S. Health Officials
The message
The biggest, loudest, most emphatic voices in the room advising people not to wear masks were initially not MAGA hatters — they were American public health officials. Most evidence of the original messaging has been scrubbed or buried across platforms like YouTube, Google, and Twitter — creating a weird Mandela effect for Taleb stans who vaguely remember the early days — but with extensive digging I was able to recover some of them.
The first tell that something was up at the time is this archive of the Tucker Carlson Show, dated March 31, 2020. On that episode, Tucker begins by blasting the government for dishonesty before going on to say:
Of course, masks work. Everyone knows that. Dozens of research papers have proved it. In South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, the rest of Asia -- where coronavirus has been kept under control -- masks were key.
So what was he responding to? As the transcript elucidates, there was a ongoing, months-long messaging campaign from the U.S. government and media that masks don’t work! For weeks, the CDC, NIH, HHS, medical establishment, and news outlets worked in concert to convince people that masks do not filter incoming coronavirus particles, and that masks actually spread COVID more.
A now-deleted tweet from the U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams urged: “Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus.” The CDC agreed in a Twitter video viewed 1.5 million times, sparking backlash from mask wearers in the replies. Adams would later double down on in televised press conferences and interviews, asserting:
"You can increase your risk of getting it by wearing a mask if you are not a health care provider…Folks who don't know how to wear them properly tend to touch their faces a lot and actually can increase the spread of coronavirus"
culminating in headlines like “Surgeon General Doubles Down: Masks Increase Virus Risk.”
It wasn’t just one rogue health official. The video is suppressed on most YouTube searches, but in a 60 Minutes interview in early March, Dr. Fauci characterized public masking as a “feel safe” response to an outbreak, saying “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.” He again warned of “unintended consequences” from people “fiddling with the masks, touching their face.”
In fact, a TIME Magazine article from March 4 lampoons the idea of mask use, quoting doctors branding it a “psychological” exercise that “gives the individual a greater sense of control.” Another doctor and senior director at the American Psychological Association deemed mask wearing “superstitious behavior,” which the article says is “the same reason [people] knock on wood or avoid walking under ladders.” A CNN report on “mask hysteria” said that “Americans don't need masks. They buy them because they're scared.”
In sum, these were people actively blasting masks as ineffective or counterproductive for controlling COVID, and wearers as unhinged, “superstitious” alarmism. Just give them red hats and they’d fit right in at a truckers rally.
The reason
In April 2020, the CDC decided to recommend mask wearing, and just like that, mask skepticism became dangerous, bannable misinfo. The media paints the initial, false messaging on masks as a natural product of “the science changing over time.” But the studies the CDC says it relied on to recommend mask use overwhelmingly predate COVID, in some cases by 10 years. Hence they couldn’t have been novel developments as COVID was happening. A literature review by Vinay Prasad, professor of epidemiology at UCSF, concurs: “We believe the evidence at the time of Fauci’s 60 Minutes interview was largely similar to that in April 2020.” (Prasad documents other Fauci “noble lies” in his Slate piece.)
So if it wasn’t actually “new science,” what happened in late spring that made the “scientific consensus” flip? A June 2020 interview with Fauci gives up the game:
Interviewer: “Why were we told later in the spring to wear masks when we were initially told not to?”
Fauci: “Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected”
He then concedes an apparent contradiction in the government’s guidance, but emphasizes, “actually the circumstances have changed,” pointing out that mask supplies became abundant later on.
It doesn’t get any clearer than that. The government wanted to conserve masks for health care workers. Their solution was to very loudly, very persistently, tell the media and public that masks don’t work to block COVID, might make COVID worse, and worrying about masks is paranoia — the very things that later metastasized into COVID misinformation. Therefore, Spotify needs to sever its ties to American public health agencies, namely the CDC-linked “COVID-19 Hub.”
Concluding Remarks
Some would call these recommendations extreme, but they are actually overly cautious. We’ve already seen that the scientific, political, and media establishments of our time can’t be trusted to provide us with honest, accurate information. What does that say about us lowly, ordinary citizens? The obvious inference — or really, just the simple truth — is that all of us are spreading misinformation and falsehoods all the time, either wittingly or unwittingly, and its causing harm to others. Whether it’s that cats drink milk (they’re lactose intolerant), cutting calories drives weight loss (the body might instead slow metabolism to conserve fat), or that we use just 10% of the brain at any given time (only some of us), we don’t have our facts straight any more than a UFC-commentator-turned-podcast-host. Therefore, the only sensible decision is for no one to be allowed on Spotify at all.
I’m not saying Spotify can’t exist. Just that no one can put podcasts on it, because everyone has a history of misinformation, and given enough time, will say something that is misinformation, and no one should have music on it either, because that would be supporting a service with a track record of broadcasting misinformation and giving money to people who voice misinformation. Peak Spotify would be if it’s just a green-and-black icon on our phones that we can click to open our Spotify Settings where we can tinker with our crossfade and EQ, shell out 10 bucks a month for Premium just for the clout, and peep the version number to verify that its the latest-and-greatest 8.6.98.1447 release or an ancient 8.6.98.1446 legacy build. Everyone’s Wrapped will be empty, but most importantly, empty of misinformation. This is what a misinformation-free app looks like.
Only then do we have a safe society.
Damn, Karthik! Daggers out, serving up the red meat. Loved this post. Keep it up dude!
This was legitimately hilarious and very important. Great job!