Pop Culture Note: Joe Rogan
A Prism analysis of the podcast host's Instagram video about the COVID misinformation controversy
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#Misinformation was in the popular imagination this week, and Prism has thoughts. This was going to be a thread on Twitter, but ended up being longer than 25 tweets. Be warned.
Let's walk through the issues raised in this video statement by @joerogan, who has been feeling pressure after platforming people with fringe COVID views on his Spotify show.
First, what we're NOT going to get into here is @Spotify's content moderation policy, or more accurately just the things it chooses to produce and publish. Could do a whole separate thread on the platform perspective on this episode. Here we'll dive just into what Rogan said.
Points to draw out, and these apply to really anyone with whatever audience they have:
Neutrality is a mirage
Believing you are neutral amplifies bad information more than good
Not everyone who dissents is a visionary
Not realizing the above makes you a mark
Rogan sincerely believes he is a conduit through which ideas, good and less good, can pass through for listeners to judge. It's not up to him to decide which are which, and anyway there is no way to tell. But neutrality is a mirage. You cannot amplify everything equally.
The same applies for every headline writer and reporter and news organization and PR person and, for that matter, person who is limited to 1,440 minutes in a day. The scarcity of time forces us to triage what we take in, and what we send back out. So we make choices.
When Rogan says he just interviews interesting people, what's the harm, he's gliding over the choice he makes in choosing some and not others. He obviously doesn't put everyone on the program who asks, so it's fair to ask why he chooses the ones he does.
There's no way around this. There's no such thing as unbiased news. This isn't well understood by most people, and naturally Rogan's claim, unattainable as it is, resonates with a lot of people. The audience likes the illusion of neutrality.
We need to take a minute to break down something here before moving on, and that is Rogan's claims about things that "used to be" misinformation and now are accepted as true. He is leaning on this pretty heavy as reason why he or anyone shouldn't prejudge dissenting viewpoints.
Bottom line: the examples he gives don't actually support what he's saying. Intentional or not on Rogan's part, it's a kind of smokescreen to persuade people that helping wrong information reach more people is an essential public service that he is performing.
As a sidebar, this "oh but look how many conspiracy theories came true" is a straw man sleight of hand you see a lot from the conspiracy crowd. Not saying he's one of them, and others who aren't on the fringe say things like this, just that the tactic is well worn.
The first for-instance Rogan gives is that eight months ago you would be "removed from social media" for uttering the notion that a person could catch and transmit COVID to others after being vaccinated. What?
No one was removed from social media on that basis. Some politicians, notably the President, and others who don't know what they're talking about, surely said getting vaccinated would prevent infection entirely. But it wasn't true, and it was known to not be true at the time.
The wrong belief that full vaccination made you 100% COVID bulletproof was--how should we say--never even close to being the consensus view of experts. Saying breakthrough cases were possible but rare was correct at the time, and saying so didn't trigger Ministry of Truth raids.
So right off the bat, Rogan has set up something that makes no sense, but maybe sounds persuasive until you stop to think about it. Okay, another try: he says you would be banned from social media for saying "cloth masks don't work."
Gotta ask here: was anyone really this specific in their critique of masks? What we observed were a lot of people who were entirely against masks and rarely, if ever, made this distinction of cloth vs. surgical. Anyway.
Saying "masks don't work" flat out, which many people did, would have been demonstrably wrong and harmful. And true, many platforms didn't allow it. Saying "cloth masks don't work"... maybe there are examples, but he seems to be choosing words carefully here to make his point.
Whether that was narrowly true last year isn't really the problem, though. It is the conceit that fast-forwarding into the present this statement about cloth masks magically became true, so ha to all the people who hated it before. Well, dude, the virus changed. You know this.
Whereas earlier strains of COVID could be slowed reasonably well with (even cloth!) masks and a bit of distancing, delta and later omicron changed the whole equation. As these came into existence, we smartly continued to study effectiveness of our countermeasures.
The lab leak theory (and it's still a theory, and still probably not correct) is next. When there's no evidence for COVID being a manufactured bioweapon, I think we can agree it's irresponsible to suggest it is. That's the situation we had in 2020 when people started saying this.
Without having seen the cover of Newsweek he's referring to, we'd guess that the story in question refers to intelligence assessments last year that left open the possibility that COVID was stored in a lab at some point. Not a confirmation. Not established in the way he suggests.
In the anti-China sentiment that flared up when COVID came to the United States, one can understand that platforms might see it as a safety issue to curtail anti-China expressions that usually went with the (at the time completely unfounded) lab leak theory.
All that said, the lab theory is less straightforward than the other two examples Rogan gives. It doesn't work well as a logical support to the point he wants to make--but what he's saying isn't strictly wrong, either, at least as far as we know.
Final note on these examples, because they do actually go to one thing that we should be concerned with. We have all lacked discipline in what types of speech we label “misinformation.” We pay for our sloppiness when this kind of stuff comes back around.
If social media companies ban people on the basis of an expansive and inclusive application of what constitutes misinformation, you can bet we are going to have a lot of problems. Keep it limited. It’s an assertion of fact that is objectively incorrect.
If it’s not an assertion of fact, forget about it. Opinions are right out. If it can’t be proven correct or incorrect, stop. If it’s about the future in any way, there is no point. These things cannot be misinformation.
For platforms, the standard of causing harm should be applied, because otherwise “this guy can eat 45 tacos in one sitting” is going to get labeled, and no one wants that. Special care should be taken with disinformation, i.e., when someone spreads misinformation on purpose.
Okay, back to the main line. Rogan goes back to his neutrality conceit: "I'm just a person who sits down and talks to people." Since Joe doesn't know what's right, he has no responsibility to his audience to, ummm, find out before beaming their "expertise" to millions?
This is why believing you are neutral helps amplify bad information more than good. You excuse yourself from gatekeeping. But it’s gatekeeping that prevents wrong, harmful information from reaching people. Like it or not, you have to vet this stuff.
Rogan has a platform. By his own account, it’s a bit of a surprise that he does. And with a platform there are a lot of people with their pet causes, and personal and political and financial interests, who will want to borrow that platform to advance their own selves.
Many of the people will be good, and some will not. You, the man with the platform, decide who to lend it to. You’re choosing to amplify them. How do you decide? What kinds of questions are you asking yourself?
Rogan introduces this video by reciting the credentials of two of his more controversial guests. Is it just that he’s impressed with their resumes? Did a friend recommend them? Did he like their YouTube video? What’s the criteria?
When you realize you’re not an unbiased agent drawing out the views of your guests and letting others decide, you can start to do right by your audience by vetting what you put in front of them. Which leads to…
… the importance of appreciating that not everyone who dissents is a visionary. Most of them, in fact, are not. The people who said masks don’t work were not right and never will be, even if masks work less well against omicron.
In Rogan's imagination, his program shares daring, dissenting visionaries with the masses. We can glimpse into the future where what this person says is universally accepted as true. But sometimes, a lot of the time, a crank is just a crank.
And a lot of cranks have credentials. This is how they take people in. A person with that kind of background (assuming they represent it accurately) would never make things up! They must be brave! And isn’t asking questions always right?
Challenging prevailing, wrong notions is how we make progress. When experts are split on a question, there is a repeatable method for using the observable world to put to bed as many of the competing hypotheses as we can.
Yes: science. Contrary to the popular notion that “asking questions” is science. When you blindly keep asking questions that whole communities of trained experts have asked and 90%+ agree on the same answer, you’re not doing science bro.
Rogan has a desire to do right by the truth, it’s just a question of what work is he willing to put in. If he doesn’t put in this work, he’s going to continue to be a mark for bad actors like Dr. Malone. Here’s what he says he will do:
agree to have Spotify apply labels warning of controversial content to his COVID episodes that go against the consensus of experts
have more experts with differing opinions immediately following the controversial ones
balance out by having both controversial opinions and mainstream opinions
do his best to research topics, in particular the controversial ones
The content labels are fine, though they probably don’t help all that much to steer people to higher quality sources of information. Having them also doesn’t mean you can avoid choosing who to amplify. And in the end, it’s Spotify’s call anyway.
Rogan’s language about which experts he will have on his show seems to come from a good place. What’s missing, though, is that no one is complaining that people with different *opinions* from theirs are being platformed.
The issue people are taking with your show is that these are alternate facts being peddled, with an accompanying conspiratorial frame, and this is leading people to make health decisions that make no sense. It’s wrong and harmful assertions, not different opinions.
The platforms, including now Spotify and Substack, all have used this language about respect for diversity of viewpoints, which is thoroughly American! What they eventually learn, though, is that they are complicit in the harms caused by misinformation. And their employees and users don’t like it.
Framing the issue as being about competing opinions mainly helps—you guessed it—bad actors. Understanding what misinformation is and does, and how amplification and platforming work, OTOH, would go a long way to helping the rest of us.
Knowing this makes it easy to see that having on a guest who says mostly correct things, even immediately after, is not nearly enough to undo the damage done by having one who says mostly incorrect things. They don’t balance out; on net, bad content wins.
Finally, on homework. Great! Really great. This is the way. Get smart not just on the topics, but on the guests before agreeing to broadcast them. Dr. Malone was vaccinated, but now he’s saying people shouldn’t be vaccinated; why?
Verify the credentials. More importantly, check out what reputation they have within their expert community. Have peers criticized or debunked this person’s work? What is this person likely to bring up, and are there known issues?
If you’re going to have someone on who is talking about “mass formation psychosis” at every opportunity, have a look at Google Scholar and see if that’s really a thing (it’s not). Ask some other experts. If it is pseudoscience, maybe don’t have them on.
Ultimately, we all can be doing more to be on the watch for misinformation. It’s why we at Prism are always saying society needs to build anti-misinformation infrastructure and help move people away from misinformation culture.
And with that, we’ll conclude. Joe, if you’ve read all the way through, we want you to know we aren’t haters. This stuff is hard, and we appreciate you taking steps to make this situation better. Reach out anytime if we can be of service.
— Kevin