Following the pressure Spotify faced from the Joe Rogan podcast, the music streaming platform has created a Safety Advisory Council to support it on future content moderation policies.

The council members will advise Spotify in key areas such as policy and safety-feature development. The overall purpose of the council is to help Spotify evolve “in a safe way”, while respecting creator expression. As such, the council cannot make enforcement decisions on specific content or creators.

The music streaming company said this is another move to be more transparent about its safety efforts, with the first move being a set of new platform rules introduced last January as a response to the Joe Rogan controversy.

The streaming platform was under fire at the start of the year for hosting The Joe Rogan Experience, a podcast that has featured interviews criticised for spreading false information on Covid-19 and vaccines.

The controversy caused a number of issues for Spotify, as musicians such as Neil Young and Joni Mitchell requested to have their music removed from Spotify, after raising concerns about the spread of misinformation.

A month later, another wave of controversy hit when singer-songwriter India Arie shared a compilation video of Rogan using racial slurs on his podcast. This led to Spotify removing more than 100 episodes of the podcast, which was Rogan’s decision according to Spotify CEO Daniel Ek.

Spotify said the founding members of the Safety Advisory Council are individuals and organisations that have expertise in key areas, to help navigate the online safety space.

“Their feedback will inform how we shape our high-level policies and the internal processes our teams follow to ensure that policies are applied consistently and at scale around the world,” Spotify said in a blog post yesterday (13 June).

The council includes individuals from Kinzen, the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the Dangerous Speech Project.

“In the months ahead, we will work closely with founding members to expand the council, with the goal of broadening regional and linguistic representation as well as adding additional experts in the equity and impact space,” Spotify said.

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