There is a hot topic behind the debate about Neil Young and others calling for the removal of steam chatter Joe Rogan from the Spotify streaming service, and not censorship, as is often and quickly claimed when it comes to the responsibility of digital platforms, but curating .
In view of the excitement surrounding the recently revised Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG), which came into force in 2018, it is worth remembering once again: Censorship means that a state controls media directly.
That doesn't happen in Germany.
The NetzDG is only intended to ensure something that is actually a matter of course: that digital platforms enforce their own usage guidelines and do not allow criminal content.
But anyway, the German NetzDG is often ineffective when it comes to digital platforms from abroad.
It is therefore possible that death threats against politicians will be published on the Telegram platform.
And stay there for a while, for months.
The federal government has filed two fines against Telegram, amounting to millions of euros, but these have so far been unsuccessful, partly because the company did not have an “eligible address”.
Many other examples of the unbelievable and intolerable can be found.
A murder, for example, that was filmed and broadcast live on Facebook.
This is just a reminder that the over-regulation of "social media" in western countries is not really the problem.
As long as everything can still be displayed on the platforms for the time being, even the most cruel and repugnant, there is not only the question of the law, but also that of responsibility.
So this is where curating comes in.
The idea that portals such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok are also responsible for the content displayed on them still seems very foreign to some.
The argument that they can't afford such curating in view of the millions of posts can now only be described as a joke in view of the billions in sales these companies make.
Some see moral responsibility as a threat to freedom of expression.
The fact that Spotify, the world's most important platform for playing pop music, has something to do with aspects of freedom of expression beyond art may also have been foreign to some.
But Spotify is no longer just a music service.
The statement by Spotify management after Neil Young's first request to remove Rogan's podcast was revealing.
It also revealed that Spotify has deleted more than twenty thousand podcast episodes that contained "fake news" since the pandemic began.
Just not Joe Rogan's because he was too expensive?
This accusation is obvious.
Nevertheless, one can apparently reasonably be of the opinion that Rogan is still within the Spotify guidelines.
But it seems pretty bigoted when Spotify boss Daniel Ek, on the one hand, regrets in a published memo to his employees how "incredibly painful" some of Rogan's comments are for some of them and that they don't represent the values of the Spotify company - at the same time but sticks to its mission in the name of "creativity".
Spotify often emphasizes this while paying most creators ridiculously low.
Ek also said, "Cancelling voices is a slippery slope." However, Spotify has already taken the slippery slope by purchasing Joe Rogan as premium content for an alleged hundred million dollars, even then knowing full well what Rogan stood for, it was Yes visible for years when he was still broadcasting on Youtube.
Spotify isn't the only one showing such bigotry.
Steve Bannon, the conspiracy convict and pardoned by Donald Trump whose Twitter account was suspended in 2020 for calling for the beheading of American virologist Anthony Fauci and FBI chief Christopher Wray, is known with his podcast The War Room. today also represented on the podcast portal of the Apple group.
However, one should not expect journalistic standards from Apple anyway.
The summaries of each show are firmly affirmative, such as, "Mark Milley is a bloody idiot, and Natalie's getting another scalp!", to take an example from Raheem Kassam and Natalie Winters' hit podcast.
But click numbers are often more important to media companies than curating, as has been shown.
This is also a slippery slope.