Let them guitars blast for Joni and Neil

Erik alluded briefly to the controversy over Neil Young and Joni Mitchell (as well as some other artists) having their music taken off Spotify as long as they continue to sponsor Joe Rogan’s anti-vaxx disinfo. A few points:

• A lot of this discourse is willfully eliding the distinction between “providing a platform” and “paying $100 million for exclusive content.” Spotify is paying a lot of money to have a guy spreading anxi-vaxx bullshit to a large audience be a part of its brand. It’s quite ridiculous to turn around and say that what Rogan says doesn’t reflect in any way on the platform that’s giving him a megaphone.
• Young — a polio survivor — and Mitchell don’t want to be associated with the brand that’s doing this, and this is what freedom of association means. If they get other artists or customers to go along with them, great. (I’m looking into Qobuz myself.)
• Defenses of Rogan from people who aren’t themselves anti-vaxx implicitly assume that being significant part of an enormously and disastrously influential anti-vaxx campaign is just a banal “right-of-center” view that should not entail any reputational or financial cost even to its largest platform proponents. Young and Mitchell are saying that there damn well should be reputational or financial costs when you’re knowingly putting anti-vaxx disinformation out to a large audience, as part of a larger reactionary propaganda campaign that’s having a huge influence. Young and Mitchell are correct.
• Large media outlets involve gatekeeping — very few people have nine-figure media deals. And before Joe Biden’s inauguration, anti-vaxx arguments generally weren’t given prominent platforms for the same reason that arguments that it’s OK to drive down a crowded street after drinking a quart of Maker’s Mark weren’t given prominent platforms.
• For people who think that the “debate me, bro!” approach will work to combat a systematic disinfo campaign, I have a movie for you.
• Let us also be clear that if Rogan’s audience was primarily New Age suburban women the amount of special pleading and false-equivalence excuses for his behavior would be reduced by roughly 99%.
• I will grant that there is a problem here we’ve discussed before, namely that “anti-vaxxism is a banal right-of-center view” is now descriptively accurate as a state of things in America. But I still don’t think that’s a good reason to just throw up your hands and preemptively decide you’re never going to try to use any leverage to change incentives at the margin.