Business
Joe Rogan Denies Spotify Censorship Rumors, According to Alex Jones
Published
2 years agoon

- The full library of “The Joe Rogan Experience” was set to debut on Spotify Tuesday following Rogan’s licensing deal with the platform in May, valued at more than $100 million.
- However, many noticed that dozens of episodes featuring controversial and far-right guests were missing, including Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, and others.
- While some called this censorship, others hesitated and were confused by missing episodes of guests like actor Tommy Chong and comedian Nick Kroll.
- Alex Jones issued a statement saying he spoke to Rogan, who said Spotify is not censoring him and explained that there were migration issues with corrupted files.
- Jones also claimed more content will be migrated over, but after the podcast moves exclusively to Spotify on Dec. 31, 100 of Rogan’s favorite episodes will remain on YouTube, where Rogan believes they’ll probably get more views.
Fans Notice Missing Episodes of “The Joe Rogan Experience” on Spotify
Podcast host Joe Rogan has denied claims that Spotify is censoring his content after rumors circulated online Tuesday, according to controversial far-right personality Alex Jones.
Rogan’s podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” finally debuted on Spotify earlier that day as part of his exclusive deal with the platform– a deal worth more than $100 million. However, the debut was met with a ton of frustration after fans noticed that dozens of episodes were missing from his podcast catalog.
This was a bit confusing since Rogan had previously said his entire library of podcasts would be available starting September 1 before becoming fully exclusive to Spotify by the end of the year.
Several news outlets and listeners claimed that the missing episodes seemed to be some of his most controversial interviews with far-right figures like Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, Gavin McInnes, and others.
Other excluded episodes featured non-political figures like comedian Chris D’Elia, who was recently accused of sexual misconduct involving minors, as well as comedian and podcast regular Joey Diaz, who came under fire when comments from an old podcast surfaced about him coercing female comics into performing oral sex.
After noticing who was missing, many began calling it censorship, wondering if it was Spotify’s choice or Rogan’s. For example, Mikhaila Peterson, daughter of controversial professor Jordan Peterson, tweeted about her episode’s exclusion, saying: “This is straight up censorship. This is absolutely ridiculous.”
This is straight up censorship. This is absolutely ridiculous. My episode with Joe is #1164. It is NOT on Spotify, along with some other episodes. pic.twitter.com/ZKTKVTIxZ1
— Mikhaila Peterson (@MikhailaAleksis) September 1, 2020
She and several others began sharing lists of all the guests who were left out, which seemed to align with this theory about censoring controversial voices. However, she did note that it was the first day the podcasts were available, leaving some room for an explanation.
Or is it day 1 and I’m making a fuss for no reason 🙃🙃🙃🙃 time will tell
— Mikhaila Peterson (@MikhailaAleksis) September 1, 2020
The censorship claims are a huge point of frustration for people because Rogan is known for talking to people from across the political spectrum. When he first announced his deal, he even noted that his show wouldn’t change.
“It’s just a licensing deal, so Spotify won’t have any creative control over the show. They want me to just continue doing it the way I’m doing it right now,” he said.
“We’re going to be working with the same crew doing the exact same show,” he continued in his announcement video.
These missing episodes had people worried about the show’s future, but others hesitated to call it censorship after finding a couple excluded guests confusing and not in line with the censorship narrative. For instance, missing episodes also included those of actor Tommy Chong, who is also a prominent cannabis rights activist, as well as comedian Nick Kroll.
Rogan Denies Claims
Later in the day, Peterson updated her Twitter thread to say, “Alex Jones says these episodes will be uploaded at a later date and it is not censorship.”
UPDATE: Alex Jones says these episodes will be uploaded at a later date and it is not censorship.
— Mikhaila Peterson (@MikhailaAleksis) September 1, 2020
Jones posted a video on his InfoWar’s site offering an explanation after speaking with Rogan. “They’ve got 1500+ files and then some migrating over, and they’ve had a few problems here and there with corrupted files, with the naming of them. And Spotify wants to have a first rollout and then a second rollout,” he said.
“Here’s the key. Joe Rogan’s favorite 100 episodes of the last 10 years or so will be left on YouTube starting December 31 when he goes exclusively to Spotify. For this couple months no man’s land the content will be on both platforms and will be migrating over.”
“And so that’s why the Alex Jones interview is not there. That’s why some of the other interviews aren’t there. Because those are going to be the exclusive interviews that are left on YouTube where, in Joe’s words, they’ll probably get more views than if they were on Spotify.”
Jones also added that he asked Rogan point-blank if Spotify was censoring him and he said, “Absolutely not.” He said Rogan explained that episodes were being organized and migrated over, but that Jones and other guests will on be on the podcast in the near future.
Peterson also later noted that her episode now appears on Spotify. It seems like a few others are as well, including episodes with Joey Diaz and Tommy Chong.
UPDATE 2: and we’re back!! Phew! @Spotify is off the hook and @joerogan is still awesome. See you folks next time for the next conspiracy theory! 🙃 pic.twitter.com/jIFghfGrEi
— Mikhaila Peterson (@MikhailaAleksis) September 1, 2020
See what others are saying: (Entertainment Weekly) (Mic) (Digg)
Business
Uber Forks Over $19 Million in Fine for Misleading Australian Riders
Published
4 weeks agoon
April 26, 2022By
Chris Tolve
The penalty is just the latest in a string of lawsuits going back years.
Uber Gets Fined
Uber has agreed to pay a $19 million fine after being sued by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission for making false or misleading statements in its app.
The first offense stems from a company policy that allows users to cancel their ride at no cost up to five minutes after the driver has accepted the trip. Despite the terms, between at least December 2017 and September 2021, over two million Australians who wanted to cancel their ride were nevertheless warned that they may be charged a small fee for doing so.
Uber said in a statement that almost all of those users decided to cancel their trips despite the warnings.
The cancellation message has since been changed to: “You won’t be charged a cancellation fee.”
The second offense, occurring between June 2018 and August 2020, involved the company showing customers in Sydney inflated estimates of taxi fares on the app.
The commission said that Uber did not ensure the algorithm used to calculate the prices was accurate, leading to actual fares almost always being higher than estimated ones.
The taxi fare feature was removed in August 2020.
A Troubled Legal History
Uber has been sued for misleading its users or unfairly charging customers in the past.
In 2016, the company paid California-based prosecutors up to $25 million for misleading riders about the safety of its service.
An investigation at the time found that at least 25 of Uber’s approved drivers had serious criminal convictions including identity theft, burglary, child sex offenses and even one murder charge, despite background checks.
In 2017, the company also settled a lawsuit by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for $20 million after it misled drivers about how much money they could earn.
In November 2021, the Justice Department sued the company for allegedly charging disabled customers a wait-time fee even though they needed more time to get in the car, then refused to refund them.
Later the same month, a class-action lawsuit in New York alleged that Uber charged riders a final price higher than the upfront price listed when they ordered the ride.
See what others are saying: (ABC) (NASDAQ) (Los Angeles Times)
Business
Report Finds That Instagram Promotes Pro-Eating Disorder Content to 20 Million Users, Including Children
Published
1 month agoon
April 14, 2022
According to the study, even users hoping to recover were given eating disorder content because they were “still in Instagram’s algorithmically curated bubble.”
Instagram Promotes Eating Disorder Content
Instagram promotes pro-eating disorder content to millions of its users, including children as young as nine-years-old, according to a Thursday report from the child advocacy non-profit group Fairplay.
The report, titled “Designing for Disorder: Instagram’s Pro-eating Disorder Bubble,” studied what it called an eating disorder “bubble,” which consisted of nearly 90,000 accounts that reached 20 million unique users. The average age of the bubble was 19, but researchers found users aged nine- and 10-years-old that followed three or more of these accounts. Roughly one-third of those in the bubble were underage.
According to Fairplay, Instagram’s parent company Meta derives $2 million in revenue a year from the bubble and another $228 million from those who follow it.
“In addition to being profitable, this bubble is also undeniably harmful,” the report said. “Algorithms are profiling children and teens to serve them images, memes and videos encouraging restrictive diets and extreme weight loss.”
“Meta’s pro-eating disorder bubble is not an isolated incident nor an awful accident,” it continued. “Rather it is an example of how, without appropriate checks and balances, Meta systematically puts profit ahead of young people’s safety and wellbeing.”
Researchers identified the bubble by first looking at 153 seed accounts with over 1,000 followers that posted content celebrating eating disorders. Some used phrases like “thinspiration” or other slang terms like “ana” and “mia” to refer to specific eating disorders. Others included an underweight body mass index in their bios.
Those seed accounts alone had roughly 2.3 million collective followers, 1.6 million of which were unique. Of those unique users, researchers looked at how many seed accounts each followed to determine that nearly 90,000 accounts were part of the eating disorder bubble. Those accounts totaled over 28 million followers, 20 million of which were unique.
These pages posted content ranging from memes and photos of extreme thinness to screenshots of progress on calorie counting apps. One user said they were on their third day of eating just 300 calories.
Others, including children under the age of 13, put their current weights and goal weights in their account bios. Some wrote that they “hate food” or were “starving for perfection.”
Content’s Impact on Children
Fairplay claimed that many of those in the bubble wanted to recover but were essentially trapped in Instagram’s algorithm.
“Many of the biographies of users in the bubble talk about wanting to or being in recovery, wanting to get ‘better’, to ‘heal’ or being aware of how unwell they were,” the report said. “However, these users are still in Instagram’s algorithmically curated bubble. They will still be feeding content from other accounts in the bubble, including the seed accounts, that normalizes, glamorizes or promotes eating disorders.”
The report also showcased the firsthand account of a 17-year-old eating disorder survivor and activist identified as Kelsey. Kelsey wrote that it was impossible to “imagine a time when the app didn’t have the sort of content that promotes disordered eating behavior.”
“I felt like my feed was always pushed towards this sort of content from the moment I opened my account,” Kelsey continued.
“That type of content at one point even got so normalized that prominent figures such as the Kardashians and other female and male influencers were openly promoting weight loss supplements and diet suppressors in order to help lose weight.”
Kelsey said Instagram delivered that content without any relevant searches, but posts about body positivity needed to be actively sought out.
The report concluded by arguing that there needs to be legislation that regulates platforms like Instagram by requiring them to prioritize user safety, particularly for children.
Meta and Instagram have long been accused of disregarding child safety. Last year, a whistleblower unveiled documents that revealed the company knew of the harm it posed to young people, specifically regarding body image. A Meta spokesperson told The Hill that they were unable to address the most recent allegations in Fairplay’s report.
“We’re not able to fully address this report because the authors declined to share it with us, but reports like this often misunderstand that completely removing content related to peoples’ journeys with or recovery from eating disorders can exacerbate difficult moments and cut people off from community,” the spokesperson said.
See what others are saying: (The Hill) (CNet)
Business
Etsy Sellers Strike Amid Increased Transaction Fees and Mandatory Offsite Advertising
Published
1 month agoon
April 11, 2022
“What began as an experiment in marketplace democracy has come to resemble a dictatorial relationship between a faceless tech empire and millions of exploited, majority-women craftspeople,” an Etsy seller wrote in a petition.
Thousands of Etsy Sellers Shut Down Shops
Roughly 15,000 Etsy sellers are closing up their online shops starting Monday in protest of several grievances they have with the platform, including a new fee increase.
Starting on Monday, transaction fees are getting boosted from 5% to 6.5% on the platform. CEO Josh Silverman sent a memo claiming that this hike will allow the company to “make significant investments in marketing, seller tools, and creating a world-class customer experience,” but sellers have been frustrated by the change.
“Etsy’s last fee increase was in July 2018. If this new one goes through, our basic fees to use the platform will have more than doubled in less than four years,” seller Kristi Cassidy wrote in a petition calling for a strike. As of Monday morning, over 50,000 Etsy sellers, customers, and employees had signed the petition.
“These basic fees do not include additional fees for Offsite ads – which started during the first wave of the pandemic,” Cassidy continued.
Offsite ads allow Etsy to advertise sellers’ products on other websites like Google. Sellers who make over $10,000 a year reportedly have no way of opting out of the program and Etsy takes at least 12% of sales generated through the promotions.
“Etsy fees are an unpredictable expense that can take more than 20% of each transaction,” Cassidy wrote. “We have no control over how these ads are administered, or how much of our money is spent.”
Etsy became a pandemic success story as online shopping rose amid lockdowns. Many turned to the platform to purchase masks and other goods, prompting its stock, sales, and number of sellers to rise.
“It’s really obnoxious to tell us sellers, ‘Hey, we made record profits last year and we’re gonna celebrate by raising your fees a whole bunch,’” Bella Stander, a maps and guidebooks publisher who sells on Etsy, told the Wall Street Journal.
What Etsy Sellers Are Demanding
Currently, there are over five million sellers on Etsy. Cassidy hopes that if enough of them unite, the company will have to respond.
“As individual crafters, makers and small businesspeople, we may be easy for a giant corporation like Etsy to take advantage of,” she wrote. “But as an organized front of people, determined to use our diverse skills and boundless creativity to win ourselves a fairer deal, Etsy won’t have such an easy time shoving us around.”
In the petition’s list of demands, it asks that Etsy cancel the transaction fee increase, allow sellers to opt out of offsite ads, and provide a transparent plan to crack down on resellers who take up space on the platform.
It also demanded that Etsy end its “Star Seller Program,” which impacts how sellers can interact with their buyers.
“Etsy was founded with a vision of ‘keeping commerce human’ by ‘democratizing access to entrepreneurship.’ As a result, people who have been marginalized in traditional retail economies — women, people of color, LGBTQ people, neurodivergent people, etc. — make up a significant proportion of Etsy’s sellers,” Cassidy wrote.
“But as Etsy has strayed further and further from its founding vision over the years, what began as an experiment in marketplace democracy has come to resemble a dictatorial relationship between a faceless tech empire and millions of exploited, majority-women craftspeople.”
In a statement to Yahoo Finance, an Etsy spokesperson claimed that sellers were the company’s “top priority.”
“We are always receptive to seller feedback and, in fact, the new fee structure will enable us to increase our investments in areas outlined in the petition, including marketing, customer support, and removing listings that don’t meet our policies,” the spokesperson said. “We are committed to providing great value for our 5.3 million sellers so they are able to grow their businesses while keeping Etsy a beloved, trusted, and thriving marketplace.”
The strike was a trending topic on Twitter Monday morning. Many sellers took to the social media site to pledge their support to the movement.
I will be joining my fellow small business owners in the strike against Etsy and will be temporarily closing my shop this upcoming week.
— Star★Salts (@starsalts) April 10, 2022
Etsy had seen record profits and yet continues to punish the artists that have helped built it. The corporate greed must end. #EtsyStrike pic.twitter.com/Iek4VhHWrO
So ya my Etsy is closed because of the #EtsyStrike but if anyone has an inkling they are more than free to check out my online store at https://t.co/4KLdXRv53a shares appreciated! pic.twitter.com/rTOoH4eB7V
— ✨️ Kate 🌟 Star Catcher Studio 🌟 (@starcatcher_art) April 11, 2022
‼️ My Etsy is now closed until the 18th. ‼️
— Lux! 👻 (@LuxrisArt) April 11, 2022
Please try not to shop on Etsy this week as a way to stand with creators like myself! ✊
Outstanding orders from the weekend will be posted out this week. If you have any questions please feel free to DM me. Thank you! #EtsyStrike pic.twitter.com/ike6Dqsldu
Many sellers are urging buyers to refrain from using the site for the remainder of the week, which is how long the protest is currently scheduled to last.
See what others are saying: (The Wall Street Journal) (Yahoo Finance) (TechCrunch)

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