Misinformation: What Should Our Tech Overlords Do?

Science Vs

Spotify Studios

Education, Science, Health & Fitness

4.4 • 12.4K Ratings

🗓️ 25 February 2022

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

After Joe Rogan was accused of spreading Covid-19 vaccine misinformation on his podcast, Spotify landed in the hot seat. People (including us!) wanted to know what the platform was doing to stop it. In this episode, we look into how tech platforms are fighting misinformation — and find out what actually works. To find out we speak to Professor David Rand, Professor Hany Farid, Laura Edelson and evelyn duoek. Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/3BOEsOo This episode was produced by Michelle Dang, Rose Rimler, and Wendy Zukerman with help from Meryl Horn, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, and Rasha Aridi. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell, with help from Caitlin Kenney. Fact checking by Nick DelRose. Thanks to the researchers we got in touch with for this episode, including Dr David Broniatowski, Dr. Alice Marwick, Dr. Anna Zaitsev, Dr. Homa Hosseinmardi, Dr. Kevin Munger, Manoel Ribeiro, Dr. Rachel Kuo, Jessica Ann Mitchell Aiwuyor, and Nick Nguyen. Very special thanks to Max Green, Casey Newton, Courtney Gilbert, Dr Karl, the Zukerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Festus from Gimla.
0:03.7	On today's app, we're tackling misinformation and asking how can tech companies stop crap
0:11.1	spreading on their platforms?
0:13.8	For us, this started because of a big blow-up involving Spotify.
0:21.9	They own this show, and they also have an exclusive deal with Joe Rogan's podcast.
0:27.5	If you listen to our last episode, you'll know all about this.
0:30.6	You'll know that Joe Rogan got into hot water over this interview he did with Robert Malone,
0:35.2	which spread COVID vaccine misinformation.
0:38.1	And people were up in arms about it, like Neil Young pushed Spotify to take Rogan off the platform.
0:44.6	They can have Rogan or Young, not both.
0:47.7	And yet, our bosses said no.
0:50.6	Well, the CEO of Spotify says it will not take Joe Rogan's podcasts off of his platform.
0:56.4	He does not believe silencing Rogan is the answer.
0:59.5	Instead of removing Rogan, here's what they did.
1:02.2	Spotify released its platform rules, which they say had been around for a while.
1:06.7	These rules are supposed to spell out what's allowed on Spotify and what's not.
1:11.1	They also put this label on content that's about COVID,
1:14.2	with a link that sends people to a page with a bunch of COVID content that they consider trustworthy.
1:19.9	But the academics that we spoke to said it's not enough.
1:24.0	What Spotify did is the bare minimum.
1:26.1	I mean, really truly the bare minimum.
1:28.3	It's not strong enough.
	...

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