Wear Your Mask - COVID-19 Thread II

[Umbire]

Though this is way off topic, as it was explained to me, Spotify is in a bit of a bind.  The sequence goes like this: we're a software company (that has music), we gotta grow fast and get lots of users -> great, we're big, how do we make profits -> podcast ads are worth more because people don't skip them -> let's produce podcasts.  They're a publisher to Joe Rogan, but just a platform to Neil Young.  So which obligation wins?  Simultaneously, they can make the more profitable Joe Rogan fans upset along with the podcasters who make them, or they can make the more numerous classic rock fans upset.

The way out is to make the moral choice, but I really don't think that's clear either.  And it definitely depends on what morals you value more.  Academic freedom is important to me, even when it costs lives -- because sometimes it actually saves lives instead.  See the failed amyloid plaque hypothesis of Alzheimers, which cost us ten years of research because brain researchers had to self-censor to get funding.

Considering that one clip of Rogan insisting on clearly incorrect information even as his guest directs him to look into it and verify, I don't think this is as open-and-shut an "academic freedom" thing as one might like to believe.

In any case, the "ideal moral choice", such as it is, would have been to not chase profit at the expense of service integrity to begin with - but in the world we live in, it took this and the fairly consistent overlooking of other, also-genuinely objectionable shit on Rogan's part for us to get here.