John Paul M. Joaquin Tech 06.14.2022 06:Jun AM EDT

Spotify Wants To Make Better Content Moderation Decisions, Forms New Safety Advisory Council

Spotify wants to better its content moderation features to improve the content it features within its platform.

The popular audio streaming and media services provider recently announced it had formed a council that would help improve its policies and products to hopefully stamp out misinformation.

Spotify's initiative allegedly comes after one of its popular podcasters, Joe Rogan, spread COVID-19 vaccine-related misinformation on his show earlier in 2022, per Tech Crunch.

Spotify Safety Advisory Council Details

Spotify introduced its Safety Advisory Council (SAC) in its recent announcement to let the world know of its formation. It is made up of individuals and organizations from around the world that have "deep exerptise" in critical areas to navigate the "online safety space."

These council members include 18 experts, with some of them representing an organization. These people include Professor Susan Benesch and Tonei Glavinic of the Dangerous Speech Project, Professor Danielle Citron, Henry Tuck, and Milo Comerford of the Insitute for Strategic Dialogue, Dr. Tanu Mitra, and Dr. Katherine Pieper and Dr. Stacy L. Smith of the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative.

The council's mission is to help Spotify evolve its policies and products "in a safe way" while making sure that the platform respects creator expressions, providing Spotify's teams with advice in important areas like policy and safety-feature development.

Council members are also expected to guide the company's approach to equity, impact, and academic research.

Although Safety Advisory Council members are unable to make enforcement decisions about specific content or creators, people can't appeal Spotify's decision on a particular incident. However, their feedback will inform how Spotify shapes its high-level policies and internal processes its teams follow to ensure that its policies are applied consistently and at scale worldwide.

Since Spotify is experimenting with things like live audio and text-to-speech AI, the council will also be looking at the company's policy in these emerging areas.

Dustee Jenkins, Spotify's global head of public affairs, mentioned that the idea of the council's formation is to bring world-renowned experts to realize a relationship between them and Spotify as a company, per CNBC.

Jenkins also mentioned that the council is also formed to ensure that "it's not talking to them when we're in the middle of a situation... Instead, we're meeting with them on a pretty regularbasis, so that we can be much more proactive about how we're thinking about these issues across the company."

Is Joe Rogan To Blame?

Although Tech Crunch mentioned that the council's formation followed Joe Rogan's controversial claims about the COVID-19 vaccines, Sarah Hoyle, Spotify's head of trust and safety, said the council was not formed because of "any particular creator or situation." Rather, it is a response to the challenges of operating a global service when threats are constantly evolving.

Tech Crunch mentioned that Joe Rogan repeatedly used his partnership with Spotify to platform misinformation about COVID-19 to a point that 270 physicians and scientists signed an open letter to Spotify demanding an institution of misinformation policies against the popular podcaster.

The open letter led high-profile figures in Spotify like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell to pull their content from Spotify.