'A Menace to Public Health': Doctors Demand Spotify Puts an End to Joe Rogan's Covid lies

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Ej Dickson
@ejdickson
EXCLUSIVE: 270 doctors and public health experts are calling on Spotify to adopt a clear misinformation policy following a mega-viral Joe Rogan interview with Dr. Robert Malone:
Joe Rogan

'A Menace to Public Health': Doctors Demand Spotify Puts an End to Covid Lies on 'Joe Rogan...
Unlike many platforms, Spotify doesn't have a policy prohibiting misinformation. 270 physicians and scientists are hoping to change that.
rollingstone.com
11:03 AM · Jan 12, 2022

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/covid-misinformation-joe-rogan-spotify-petition-1282240/

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https://archive.fo/wl2wc


As an infectious disease epidemiologist and research fellow at Boston’s Children’s Hospital who debunks health misinformation on Instagram —where she has more than 380,000 followers — Jessica Malaty Rivera regularly receives tips from her followers about viral content to debunk. A few weeks ago, her followers started sending her a link to an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, the most popular podcast in the world. The episode was an interview with Dr. Robert Malone, a virologist who touts himself as one of the architects of mRNA technology.

Rivera was familiar with Rogan, as well as Malone. She knew that Malone had been banned from Twitter for promoting Covid-19 misinformation, and that he had been making the rounds in conservative media circles undermining the efficacy of the vaccine. When she watched the interview, she was horrified to see that he espoused various conspiratorial and baseless beliefs, from the idea that “mass formation psychosis” is responsible for people believing in the efficacy of vaccines; to the claim popular among anti-vaxxers that hospitals are financially incentivized to falsely diagnose Covid-19 deaths. The episode featuring Malone went viral, and was shared widely in right-wing media circles as well as on Facebook, where the link on Spotify has been shared nearly 25,000 times, according to CrowdTangle data.

Yet Rivera was even more horrified to discover that people in her life, whom she considered to be “quite wise and discerning,” were hoodwinked by Malone’s patina of academic credibility, considering his views on the vaccine legitimate. “When I saw they were falling victim to this, I spoke to some colleagues and we said something has to be done at this point,” she says.

Rivera is one of 270 doctors, physicians, and science educators who signed an open letter calling on Spotify, which obtained exclusively streaming rights to the Joe Rogan Experience in a reported $100 million deal, to take action against misinformation on the platform, such as that contained in the interview with Malone. “With an estimated 11 million listeners per episode, JRE, which is hosted exclusively on Spotify, is the world’s largest podcast and has tremendous influence,” the letter reads. “Spotify has a responsibility to mitigate the spread of misinformation on its platform, though the company presently has no misinformation policy.”

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[crickets]

1. K&R for visibility.

[blogslug]

3. agree