Two years after being kicked off of Spotify for spreading misinformation, far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones returned as a guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast, the Joe Rogan Experience. In a three-hour-long discussion uploaded to the platform on Tuesday, Jones ran through a series of unsubstantiated claims regarding COVID-19 vaccine trials, Bill Gates, and the science behind climate change. In September, Rogan signed a reported $100 million licensing deal with Spotify that brought his wildly popular podcast to the platform’s more than 286 million active listeners. Prior to the move, Rogan had invited Jones onto several episodes of his podcast. He made attempts to fact check Jones’s claims during the episode in question, saying, “We all know that you’ve fucked some things up, right? But you’ve gotten so many things right. This is why I keep talking to you about these things, and that’s why I defend you and why I think it’s fucking dangerous to censor you.” Also making an appearance on Tuesday was comedian Tim Dillion who reportedly wore a “free Ghislaine [Maxwell]” T-shirt, and who falsely claimed that Democrats are using shutdowns aimed at mitigating the spread of COVID-19 to prevent people from “private ownership of cars,” among other things.
Jones’s appearance quickly drew attention online, with liberal activist organization Sleeping Giants tweeting, “Wow. Guess @Spotify is okay with people who harass parents of murdered children. Noted.” In addition to Spotify, Jones has been barred from Apple, Facebook, and YouTube, with most of the platforms citing “hate speech” as the cause. Jones has repeatedly claimed that the Sandy Hook 2012 massacre was “a hoax,” and last year he was accused of sending child pornography embedded in emails to lawyers of the victims’ families. (Jones claimed he was the victim of a conspiracy and had no knowledge the images were embedded.)
A leaked email obtained by BuzzFeed News from Horacio Gutierrez, Spotify’s chief legal officer and head of global affairs, shows the platform scrambling to get its employees on the same page regarding the Rogan/Jones episode. One section stated, “If a team member has concerns about any piece of content on our platform, you should encourage them to report it to Trust & Safety because they are the experts on our team charged with reviewing content. However,” the memo continues, “it’s important that they aren’t simply flagging a piece of content just because of something they’ve read online. It’s all too common that things are taken out of context.”
This is not the first time Rogan has come under fire since landing at Spotify. About three weeks after making his September 1 debut, he issued an apology for sharing a right-wing conspiracy theory positing that left-wing activists were behind the wildfires raging across the West Coast. “I fucked up on the podcast with Douglas Murray and said that people got arrested lighting fires in Portland. That turns out to not be true,” he tweeted. “I was very irresponsible not looking into it before I repeated it.” At the time, Rogan also railed against the media for not covering the alleged arson.
Rogan’s contract with Spotify gives him complete editorial control. One suggested talking point from the leaked email asked upper management to reiterate that, “We are not going to ban specific individuals from being guests on other people’s shows, as the episode/show complies with our content policies.” The same day the Jones episode aired, Jones himself played host to militia leader Stewart Rhodes who, according to Media Matters, toyed with the idea of a “second civil war” should Biden emerge victorious in the coming election.
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