Spotify regularly fights against disinformation content posted on its platform. It's mostly about podcasts. The company itself published statistics that during the pandemic over 20000 episodes of various podcasts containing false information were removed. However, some episodes of one of the most popular podcasts in the world have not been removed. It is about episodes of Joe Rogan's broadcast, who signed a contract with Spotify guaranteeing that his podcasts will appear exclusively on this platform. Last year, some of the episodes published by Rogan were removed due to the spread of anti-science views, but the portal can still listen to the broadcast from 31th December 2021. At that time, Joe Rogan's guest was Dr. Robert Malone, who, according to experts, presented some false information about vaccines on COVID-19. Spotify does not intend to respond to this content, which has upset many people.
A special open letter was created in which more than 270 scientists asked Spotify to remove the episode due to spreading misinformation about vaccines. The attitude of the website owners did not like one of the musicians - Neil Young. He informed the owners of the portal that if the episode won't be removed from Spotify, then he wants his music to be removed from the portal immediately. All because of the company's policy, which, in his opinion, allows spreading false information about vaccines. Spotify reacted to this information, but decided not to delete the podcast episode of Rogan. Instead, Spotify followed up on Neil Young's request and removed his music from the platform. An official statement was even released, in which Spotify informs that the company regrets that the musician made such a decision, in the same moment hoping that Neil Young's music will soon return to Spotify.