Category: Newsletters

Last week, criticism of Spotify for hosting the Joe Rogan podcast—and thereby enabling the distribution of misinformation about COVID, among other things—accelerated after music legend Neil Young chose to remove all of his work from the streaming service. “I am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines—potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by them,” Young wrote in a letter on his website (which has since been removed). He was followed by a number of other artists, including fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell, Nils Lofgren, and the other former members of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Prince Harry, the Duke of York, and his wife Meghan Markle, also registered their concerns about the service, which they have partnered with for a series of podcasts.

Throughout this process, Spotify’s position has remained steadfast: it said it is sorry for any harm caused by Rogan’s podcast, and it plans to add content warnings and other measures, but it also maintained that it is a platform and not a publisher—in other words, simply a conduit for content produced by artists such as Rogan, and not a publisher that makes choices about which specific kinds of content to include. Daniel Ek, co-founder and CEO of Spotify, wrote in a blog post that the company supports “creator expression,” and that there are plenty of artists and statements carried on the service that he disagrees with. “We know we have a critical role to play in supporting creator expression while balancing it with the safety of our users,” he said. “In that role, it is important to me that we don’t take on the position of being content censor.”

The only problem with Spotify’s platform defense—at least as it pertains to Joe Rogan—is that it isn’t true (even some Spotify employees called it “a dubious assertion” according to the LA Times). Rogan’s podcast isn’t available through any other service such as YouTube Music, Amazon Music, etc. He has an exclusive contract with Spotify, a relationship the company paid $100 million for. In that sense, Spotify is his publisher. As Elizabeth Spiers, former editor of the New York Observer, pointed out, this is a clear editorial choice the company has made, just as the New York Times or the Washington Post choose whom they give a column to. If those columnists decide to say something wrong or dangerous, responsibility for that lies with the paper.

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Continue reading “Of platforms, publishers, and responsibility”

Last June, James Boasberg, a judge with U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, threw out an antitrust case that was filed by the Federal Trade Commission against Facebook (which has since changed its corporate name to Meta). The lawsuit alleged that the company has an illegal monopoly on social networking services, that it built this monopoly in part by acquiring competing services such as WhatsApp and Instagram, and that it uses its monopoly position in an anti-competitive way against other companies. In his dismissal of the case, Boasberg said that the federal regulator had failed to provide enough tangible evidence that Facebook had anything approaching a monopoly over a discrete market segment known as social networking (a similar antitrust lawsuit filed by 40 state attorneys-general was also dismissed by Boesberg last June, but the states have not yet filed an appeal).

The judge left the door open for the FTC, however, telling the agency it was welcome to try again, if and when it accumulated the evidence he sought. On Tuesday, Boasberg ruled that the majority of a new FTC lawsuit can proceed, based on evidence of a monopoly position provided by the agency in its revised submission. The judge said the FTC’s first attempt at a lawsuit “stumbled out of the starting blocks,” but that the facts provided by the agency this time were “far more robust and detailed than before, particularly in regard to the contours of defendant’s alleged monopoly.” Boasberg blocked another part of the case, which alleged that Facebook harmed competitors by illegally restricting access to its platform—he said Facebook “abandoned the policies in 2018, and its last alleged enforcement was even further in the past.

Although some critics of the FTC’s case, including technology analyst Ben Thompson, have questioned the accuracy of the agency’s attempts to define a specific market for “personal social networking” over which Facebook allegedly has a monopoly, Boasberg found no fault with this market definition. In his first ruling, he said that “while there are certainly bones one could pick with the FTC’s market-definition allegations, the Court does not find them fatally devoid of meat.” In terms of whether Facebook has anything approaching a monopoly, the judge seemed to be convinced in his latest decision by the addition of data from Comscore, a traffic measurement company, which said “Facebook’s share of DAUs [daily average users] of apps providing personal social networking services in the United States has exceeded 70 percent since 2016.”

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Continue reading “The FTC’s second try at an antitrust case against Facebook gets the green light”