After facing enough heat from the community and losing market value, Spotify is finally doing something to tackle COVID-19 misinformation on its platform.
This is through applying advisory labels on podcasts that contain discussions on COVID-19. Also, Spotify has created an information hub of COVID-19, where users will be directed for learning the facts before making any judgments. These features will be rolling out in the coming days, as we haven’t seen labels being applied on controversial podcasts as of now.
Spotify Advisory Labels
Following the suite of Facebook, Spotify is now preparing to lay labels on top of the content that may contain misinformation about COVID-19. This was revealed by the company’s CEO and co-founder, Daniel Ek on Sunday, after facing backlash from the community.
For the last three weeks, Spotify was accused of letting podcasters like Joe Rogan invite unreliable speakers to talk about COVID-19, who share misinformation on critical topics. More specifically, Joe Rogan ran a podcast in December with Dr. Robert Malone, who was banned from Twitter for spreading covid-19 misinformation.
Yet, he made controversial statements in the podcast like people were being hypnotized to believe the efficacy of vaccines, and hospitals are receiving a financial incentive to classify deaths as being caused by covid-19.
This triggered the scientific community, where a group of 270 scientists, health care professionals, and educators has sent an open letter to Spotify asking the platform to make a clear public policy to moderate misinformation. While they didn’t raise any flag for Joe Rogan’s podcast, soon after this, Spotify’s market share value has dipped by $2 billion.
This also comes after two prominent artists, and many other creators leave or cancel their subscriptions to Spotify in support of the open letter. Thus, Spotify has now come up with a solution similar to Facebook – applying labels on content that may contain COVID-19 discussion.
Moreover, there will be a COVID-19 information hub curated by scientists, doctors, and public health authorities, to make people learn the facts. Also, there are new policies for creators to make them “understand their accountability for the content they post.” All these will be showing up soon, across Spotify.
