Following days of controversy stemming from Spotify’s handling of allegations that Joe Rogan has used the platform to spread COVID-19 misinformation, the company said on Sunday it would take new measures to point its users to accurate information about the pandemic. In a blog post attributed to CEO Daniel Ek, the company admitted it hasn’t been transparent enough about its content policy, but stopped short of detailing any specific action against Rogan.

Sometime in the next few days, Spotify says it will add a content advisory to any podcast episode that includes a discussion about COVID-19. That advisory will direct listeners to the company’s COVID-19 Hub. In its current iteration, the page includes links to podcasts from the BBC, ABC News and Foreign Policy. “To our knowledge, this content advisory is the first of its kind by a major podcast platform,” according to Ek. However, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have employed similar measures.

Spotify has also pledged to publicly share its content guidelines. As of today, you can read them through the company’s Newsroom website. In the future, they’ll also be accessible through Spotify’s main website, and the company has promised to translate them into a variety of other languages. Lastly, the company says it plans to start testing ways to highlight its content guidelines in the tools it offers to podcast producers and other creators.

“We know we have a critical role to play in supporting creator expression while balancing it with the safety of our users,” Ek said. “In that role, it is important to me that we don’t take on the position of being content censor while also making sure that there are rules in place and consequences for those who violate them.”

The action comes after musicians like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell pulled their music from the streaming platform in protest of its handling of Rogan’s podcast and misinformation more broadly. Earlier today, author Brené Brown said she would not release any new episodes of her Spotify-exclusive podcast “until further notice.”

After Young first pulled his catalog from the platform, the company defended its record against misinformation by claiming it had removed 20,000 COVID-related episodes since the start of the pandemic. However, as part of that sweep, Spotify appears to have not removed any episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience. For instance, you can still listen to the controversial episode where Dr. Robert Malone falsely claims “mass formation psychosis” has led people to believe vaccines are effective against COVID-19. The Verge subsequently published the company’s COVID-19 content guidelines. In an internal memo, Spotify said Rogan's content did not "meet the threshold for removal.”

Paramount+’s live-action Halo series will debut on March 24th, according to a teaser the streamer shared today ahead of the AFC Championship Game on CBS. At approximately the 53-second mark of the clip, you can hear the announcer state the release date.

After sharing the first-look teaser back at The Game Awards in December, Paramount+ promised to release a longer trailer partway through today’s match between the Cincinnati Bengals and Kansas City Chiefs. CBS will air the trailer during halftime, with the game scheduled to start at 3:05PM ET. We’ll update this article with the full-length trailer once it drops.

First announced back in 2013, the Halo live-action series spent years in development hell before ViacomCBS announced last year the show would premiere on Paramount+ instead of Showtime, as previously planned. Pablo Schreiber, of American Gods fame, is the one donning Master Chief’s signature Mjolnir armor, and the entire project oozes high production values.

Netflix's love affair with Masters of the Universe isn't about to cool down any time soon. The streaming service is partnering with Mattel to develop a live-action Masters of the Universe movie — no, they weren't put off by the 1987 flop. Production is expected to start this summer, with the Nee Brothers (who created the upcoming The Lost City) co-directing the title and writing it alongside Shang-Chi's David Callaham.

The companies haven't divulged much about the plot, but they've already chosen Kyle Allen (Balkan in West Side Story) as Prince Adam/He-Man. Not surprisingly, there are hints Adam will discover his power as He-Man and fight Skeletor to protect Eternia.

This isn't a surprising move when MOTU has been lucrative for Netflix. Its She-Ra reboot had five seasons, and Kevin Smith's Masters of the Universe: Revelation is starting its second season in March. There's also a child-oriented CG animated series, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Between this and other '80s flashbacks, Netflix appears to know what nostalgia makes its audience tick.

The Silent Era of cinema was perhaps its most equitable with both hearing and hearing-impaired viewers able to enjoy productions alongside one another, but with the advent of "talkies," deaf and hard-of-hearing American's found themselves largely excluded from this new dominant entertainment medium. It wouldn't be until the second half of the 20th century that advances in technology enabled captioned content to be broadcast directly into homes around the country. In his latest book, Turn on the Words! Deaf Audiences, Captions, and the Long Struggle for Access, Professor Emeritus, National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology, Harry G. Lang, documents the efforts of accessibility pioneers over the course of more than a century to bring closed captioning to the American people.

Gallaudet University Press

From Turn on the Words! Deaf Audiences, Captions, and the Long Struggle for Access by Harry G. Lang. Copyright © 2021 by Gallaudet University. Excerpted by permission.

The Battle for Captioned Television

To the millions of deaf and hard of hearing people in the United States, television before captioning had been “nothing more than a series of meaningless pictures.” In 1979, Tom Harrington, a twenty-eight-year old hard of hearing audiovisual librarian from Hyattsville, Maryland, explained that deaf and hard of hearing people “would like to watch the same stuff as everyone is watching, no matter how good or how lousy. In other words, to be treated like everyone else.”

On March 16, 1980, closed captioning officially began on ABC, NBC, and PBS. The first closed captioned television series included The ABC Sunday Night Movie, The Wonderful World of Disney, and Masterpiece Theater. In addition, more than three decades after the movement to make movies accessible to deaf people began, ABC officially opened a new era by airing its first closed captioned TV movie, Force 10 from Navarone.

By the end of March 1980, sixteen captioned hours of programming were going out over the airwaves each week, and by the end of May, Sears had sold 18,000 of the decoding units within four months of offering them for sale. Sears gave NCI an $8 royalty for each decoding device sold. The funds were used to defray the costs of captioning. In addition to building up a supply of captioned TV programs during its first year of operation, so that a sufficient volume would be available for broadcast, NCI concentrated on training caption editors. A second production center was established in Los Angeles and a third in New York City.

John Koskinen, chairman of NCI’s board, reflected on the challenges the organization faced at this time. A much smaller market for the decoders was evident than that estimated through early surveys. As with the telephone modem that was simultaneously developing, the captioning decoders cost a significant sum for most deaf consumers in those days, and the expense of a decoder did not buy a lot because not all the captioned hours being broadcast were of interest to many people. Although the goal was to sell 100,000 decoders per year, NCI struggled to sell 10,000, and this presented a financial burden.

To help pay for the captioning costs, NCI also set up a “Caption Club” to raise money from organizations serving deaf people and from other private sources. By December 1983, $15,000 was taken in and used to pay for subtitles on programs that otherwise would not be captioned. By 1985, there were 3,500 members promoting the sales.

Interestingly, when sales suddenly went up one year, NCI investigated and found that the Korean owner of an electronics store in Los Angeles was selling decoders as a way to enhance English learning.

The next big breakthrough was the move toward the use of digital devices recently adopted by court recorders that, for NCI, allowed the captioning of live television. Having the ability to watch the evening news and sporting events with captions made the purchase of a decoder more attractive, as did the decline in its price over time.

When the American television network NBC showed the twelve hour series Shogun in 1980, thousands of deaf people were able to enjoy it. The $20 million series was closed captioned and 30,000 owners of the special decoder sets received the dialogue.

Jeffrey Krauss of the FCC admitted that deaf people had not had full access to television from the very beginning: “But by early 1980 it should be possible for the deaf and [hard of hearing] to enjoy many of the same programs we do via a new system called ‘closed captioning.’” Sigmond Epstein, a deaf printer from Annandale, Virginia, felt that “there is more than a 100 percent increase in understanding.” And Lynn Ballard, a twenty-five-year-old deaf student from Chatham, New Jersey, believed that closed captioning would “improve the English language skills and increase the vocabulary of deaf children.” Newspaper reports proliferated, describing the newfound joy among deaf people in gaining access to the common television. Educators recognized the technological advance as a huge leap forward. “I consider closed captioning the single most important breakthrough to give the deaf access to this vital medium,” said Edward C. Merrill Jr., president of Gallaudet College, adding presciently, “Its usage will expand beyond the hearing-impaired.” And an ex-cop cried when his deaf wife wept for joy at understanding Barney Miller. He wrote a letter to the TV networks, cosigned by their six small children, to tell of the new world of entertainment and learning now open to his wife.

3-2-1 Contact was among the first group of television programs, and the first children’s program, to be captioned in March 1980. This science education show produced by Children’s Television Workshop aired on PBS member stations for eight years. Later that same year, Sesame Street became the second children’s program to be captioned and became the longest running captioned children’s program. — “NCI Recap’d,” National Captioning Institute

The enthusiasm continued to spread swiftly among deaf people. Alan Hurwitz, then associate dean for Educational Support Services at NTID, and his family were all excited about the captioning of primetime television programs. Hurwitz, who would eventually be president of Gallaudet University, was, like everyone else at this time, hooked on the new closed captioning technology. One of his favorite programs in 1981 was Dynasty, which was shown weekly on Wednesday night at 9 p.m. He flew to Washington, DC, early one Wednesday morning to meet with congressional staff members in different offices all day long. Not having a videotape recorder, he made sure he had scheduled a flight back home in time to watch Dynasty. After the meetings he arrived at the airport on time only to find out that the plane was overbooked and he was bumped off and scheduled for a flight the next morning. He panicked and argued with the airline clerk that he had to be home that night, and stressed that he couldn’t miss the flight. He was put on a waiting list and there were several folks ahead of him. Then, when he learned that he would definitely miss the flight, he went back to the clerk and insisted that he get on the plane. He explained that he had no way to contact his wife and was concerned about his family. Finally, the clerk went inside the plane and asked if anyone would like to get off and get a reward for an additional flight at no cost. One passenger volunteered to get off and Hurwitz was allowed to take his seat. The plane left a bit late and arrived in Rochester barely in time for him to run to his car in the parking lot and drive home to watch Dynasty!

And even with the positive response from many consumers, it was reported in 1981 that the Sears TeleCaption decoders were not selling well. It was a catch-22 situation. “People hesitate to buy because more programs aren’t captioned; more programs aren’t captioned because not that large an audience has adapters.” Increasing one would clearly increase the other. The question was whether to wait for “the other” to happen. To do so would most likely endanger a considerable federal investment as well as the continued existence of the system. Some theorized that the major factors for the poor sale of decoders were the depressed state of the economy, the lack of a captioned prime-time national news program (which deaf and hard of hearing people cited as a top priority), insufficient numbers of closed captioned programs, and an unrealistic expectation by some purchasers that decoder prices would decrease in spite of the fact that the retailer markup was slightly above the actual production cost.

Captioning a TV Program: A Continuing Challenge

On average, it took twenty-five to forty hours to caption a one-hour program. First, the script was typed verbatim, including every utterance such as “uh,” stuttering, and so forth. Asterisks were inserted to indicated changes in speakers. Next, the time and place of the wording was checked in the program. The transcript was examined for accuracy, noting when the audio starts and stops, and then it was necessary to decide whether the captions should be placed on the left, right, or center of the screen. In 1981, NCI’s goal was to provide no more than 120 to 140 reading words per minute for adult programs and sixty to ninety for children’s programs.

“We have to give time for looking at the picture,” Linda Carson, manager of standards and training at NCI, explained. “A lot of TV audio goes up to 250 or 300 words per minute. That’s tough for caption writers. If the time lapse for a 15-word sentence is 4 ½ seconds, then the captioner checks the rate computation chart and finds out she’s got to do it in nine words.”

Carl Jensema, NCI’s director of research, who lost his hearing at the age of nine, explained that at the start of kindergarten, hearing children have about 5,000 words in their speaking vocabulary, whereas many deaf children are lucky to have fifty. Consequently, deaf children had very little vocabulary for the school to build on. Jensema believed that closed captioning might be the biggest breakthrough for deaf people since the hearing aid. He was certain that a high degree of exposure to spoken language through captioned television was the key to enhanced language skills in deaf people.

CBS Resists

Although ABC, PBS, and NBC were involved in collaborating with NCI to bring captions to deaf audiences, the system CBS supported, teletext, was developed in the United Kingdom and was at least three years away from implementation. “It seems to me that CBS, by not going along with the other networks, might be working in derogation of helping the deaf or the hearing-impaired to get this service at an earlier date—and I don’t like it.” FCC commissioner Joseph Fogarty told Gene Mater, assistant to the president of the CBS Broadcast Group. Despite the success of line 21 captioning, CBS’s Mater believed the teletext system was “so much better” and the existing system was “antiquated.” “I think what’s unfortunate is that the leadership of the hearing-impaired community has not seen fit to support teletext. Those people who have seen teletext recognize it as a communications revolution for the deaf.” In contrast, NCI’s Jeff Hutchins summarized that the World System Teletext presented various disadvantages. It could not provide real-time captioning, “at least not in the way we have seen it . . .” Also, it could not work with home videotape. He believed that even if World System Teletext were adopted by the networks and other program suppliers, the technology would not be an answer for the needs of the American Deaf community. He also explained that “too many services now enjoyed by decoder owners would be lost.”

CBS even petitioned the FCC in July 1980 for a national teletext broadcasting standard. Following this, the Los Angeles CBS affiliate announced plans to test teletext in April 1981. “CBS was so opposed to line 21 that even when advertisers captioned their commercials at no charge to CBS,” Karen Peltz Strauss wrote, “the network allegedly promised to strip the captions off before airing the ads.”

CBS continued its refusal to join the closed captioning program, largely because of its own research into the teletext system and because the comparatively low number of adapters purchased. The NAD accused CBS of failing to cooperate with deaf television viewers by refusing to caption its TV programs.

The NAD planned nationwide protests shortly after this. Hundreds of captioning activists gathered at studios around the country. In Cedar Rapids, one young child carried a sign that read, “Please caption for my Mom and Dad.” Gertie Galloway was one of the disappointed deaf consumers. “CBS has not cooperated with the deaf community,” she stated. “We feel we have a right to access to TV programs.” She was one of an estimated 300 to 400 people carrying signs, who marched in front of the CBS studio in Washington and who were asking supporters to refuse to watch CBS for the day. Similar demonstrations were held in New York, where there were 500 people picketing, and the association said that protests had been scheduled in the more than 200 communities where CBS had affiliates.

Harold Kinkade, the Iowa Association of the Deaf vice president, said, “I don’t think deaf people are going to give up on this one. We always fight for our rights to be equal with the people with hearing.”

The drama increased in August 1982 when it was announced that NBC was dropping captions due to decreased demand. It was two years after NBC had become a charter subscriber. John Ball, president of NCI, said, “There is no question that this hurts. This was a major revenue source for NCI. I think the next six months or so are going to be crucial for us.”

Captioning advocates included representatives from NTID, the National Fraternal Society of the Deaf, Gallaudet, and NAD. Karen Peltz Strauss tells the story of Phil Bravin, chair of a newly established NAD TV Access Committee, who represented the Deaf community in a meeting with NBC executives. Although the NBC meeting was successful, CBS was still resisting and Bravin persisted. As Strauss summarized, “After one particularly frustrating three-hour meeting with the CBS President of Affiliate Relations Tony Malara, Bravin left, promising to ‘see you on the streets of America.’”

In 1984, CBS finally gave in, and the network dual encoded its television programs with both teletext and line 21 captions. The issue with NBC also resolved, and by 1987 the network was paying a third of the cost of the prime-time closed captioning. The rest was covered by such sources as independent producers and NCI, with funds from the US Department of Education used for captioning on CBS and ABC as well. 

In his book Closed Captioning: Subtitling, Stenography, and the Digital Convergence of Text with Television, Gregory J. Downey summarized that because the film industry was unwilling to perform same-language subtitling for its domestic audience, the focus of deaf and hard of hearing persons’ “educational and activist efforts toward media justice through subtitling in the 1970s and 1980s had decisively moved away from the high culture of film and instead toward the mass market of television.”

Meanwhile, teachers and media specialists in schools for deaf children across the United States were reporting that their students voluntarily watched captioned TV shows recorded on videocassettes over and over again. These youngsters were engaged in reading, with its many dimensions and functions. In the opinion of some educators, television was indeed helping children learn to read.

People at NCI looked forward to spin-offs from their efforts. They liked to point out that experiments on behalf of deaf people produced the telephone and that the search for a military code to be read in the dark led to braille. Closed captioning should be no different in that regard. The technology also showed promise for instructing hearing children in language skills. Fairfax County public schools in Virginia, authorized a pilot project to study the effectiveness of captioned television as a source of reading material. The study explored the use of closed captioned television in elementary classrooms, evaluated teacher and student acceptance of captioning as an aid to teaching reading, and served as a guide to possible future expansion of activities in this area. Instead of considering television as part of the problem in children’s declining reading and comprehension skills, Fairfax County wanted to make it part of the solution. Promising results were found in this study as well as in other NCI-funded studies with hearing children, and when NCI’s John Ball submitted his budget request to Congress for fiscal year 1987 he was citing “at least 1,500,000 learning disabled children” as a potential audience for captioning and the market for decoder purchases.

In a personal tribute to Carl Jensema, Jeff Hutchins wrote that the only aspect of NCI that really made it an “institute” was the work Carl did to research many different aspects of captioning, including its readability and efficacy among consumers. His work led to a revision of techniques, which made captioning more effective. Once Carl left NCI and the research department was shut down, NCI was not really an “institute” any longer. John Ball also believed in the importance of Jensema’s research at NCI. His studies clearly demonstrated the impact of captioning on NCI’s important audience.

Real-Time Captioning

As early as 1978, the captioning program began to fund developmental work in real-time captioning with the objective of making it possible to caption live programs, such as news, sports, the Academy Awards, and space shuttle launches. This developmental work, however, did not result in the system finally being used. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was exploring a system that would allow the spoken word to appear in printed text. As it turned out, a private concern resulted from the CIA project, Stenocomp, which marketed computer translations to court reporters. The Stenocomp system relied on a mainframe computer and was thus too cumbersome. However, when Stenocomp went out of business, a new firm developed—Translation Systems, Inc. (TSI) in Rockville, Maryland. Advances in computer technology made it possible to install the Stenocomp software into a minicomputer. This made it possible for the NCI to begin real-time captioning using a modified stenotype machine linked to a computer via a cable.

On December 20, 1982, the Ninety-Seventh Congress passed a joint resolution authorizing President Ronald Reagan to proclaim December as “National Close-Captioned Television Month.” The proclamation was in recognition of the NCI service that made television programs meaningful and understandable for deaf and hard of hearing people in the United States.

By 1982, NCI was applying real-time captioning to a variety of televised events, including newscasts, sports events, and other live broadcasts, bringing deaf households into national conversations. The information, with correct punctuation, was brought to viewers through the work of stenographers trained as captioners typing at speeds of up to 250 words per minute. Real-time captioning was used in the Supreme Court to allow a deaf attorney, Michael Chatoff, to understand the justices and other attorneys.

However, fidelity was not the case for many years on television, and problems existed with real-time captioning. In real-time captioning, an individual typed the message into an electric stenotype machine, similar to those used in courtrooms, and the message included some shorthand. A computer translated the words into captions, which were then projected on the screen. Because “this captioning occurred ‘live’ and relies on a vocabulary stored in the software of the computer, misspellings and errors* could and did occur during transcriptions.”

Over the years, many have worked toward error reduction in realtime captioning. As the Hearing Loss Association of America has summarized, “Although real-time captioning strives to reach 98 percent accuracy, the audience will see errors. The caption writer may mishear a word, hear an unfamiliar word, or have an error in the software dictionary. In addition, transmission problems can create technical errors that are not under the control of the caption writer.”

At times, captioners work in teams, similar to some sign language interpreters, and provide quick corrections. This was the approach the pioneer Martin Block used during the Academy Awards in April 1982. Block typed the captions while a team of assistants provided him with correct spellings of the award nominees.

There has also been a growing body of educational research supporting the benefits of captions. As one example, E. Ross Stuckless referred to the concept of real-time caption technology in the early 1980s as the “computerized near-instant conversion of spoken English into readable print.” He also described the possibility of using real-time captioning in the classroom. Michael S. Stinson, another former colleague of mine and also a deaf research faculty member at NTID at RIT, was involved with Stuckless in the first implementation and evaluation of real-time captioning as an access service in the classroom. Stinson subsequently obtained numerous grants to develop C-Print access through real-time captioning at NTID, where hundreds of deaf and hard of hearing students have benefited in this postsecondary program. C-Print also was found successful in K–12 programs.

Communication Access Real-Time Translation (CART) is another service provided in a variety of educational environments, including small groups, conventions, and remote transmissions to thousands of participants viewing through streaming text. Displays include computers, projection screens, monitors, or mobile devices, or the text may be included on the same screen as a PowerPoint presentation.

Special approaches have been used in educational environments. For example, at NTID, where C-Print was developed by Stinson, the scripts of the classroom presentations and communication between professors and students are printed out, and errors are corrected and given to the students to study.

In October 1984, ABC’s World News This Morning became the first daytime television program to be broadcast to viewers with decoders through real-time captioning technology. Within a few weeks, the ABC’s Good Morning America was broadcast with captions as well. “This is a major milestone in the evolution of the closed-captioned television service,” John E. D. Ball declared, describing it as a “valued medium” to deaf and hard of hearing viewers. Don Thieme, a spokesman for NCI, explained that the Department of Education had provided The Caption Center with a $5.3 million contract. These two programs joined ABC’s evening news program World News Tonight and the magazine show 20/20 as the only regularly scheduled news and public affairs available for deaf viewers. The captioned news programs would be phased in gradually during the summer and early fall. Real-time captioning was also provided for the presidential political debates around this time. More than sixty-five home video movies had also been captioned for deaf people. This was an important step toward providing more access to entertainment movies for deaf consumers.

The first time the Super Bowl was aired with closed captions was on January 20, 1985. In September 1985, ABC’s Monday Night Football became the first sports series to include real-time captioning of commentary. ABC, its affiliates, the US Department of Education, advertisers, corporations, program producers, and NCI’s Caption Club helped to fund this program. Using stenotype machines, speed typists in Falls Church, Virginia, listened to the telecast and produced the captions at about 250 words per minute and they appeared on the screen in about four seconds. Each word was not typed separately. Instead, the captioner stroked the words out phonetically in a type of shorthand. Then a computer translated the strokes back into the printed word. These words were sent through phone lines to the ABC control room in New York City, where they were added to the network signal and transmitted across the country. Darlene Leasure, who was responsible for football, described one of the challenges she encountered: “When I was programming my computer at the beginning of the season, I found thirteen Darrels with seven different spellings in the NFL. It’s tough keeping all those Darrels straight.”

As TV shows with closed captions grew in popularity, deaf people were attracted away from the captioned film showings at social clubs or other such gatherings. The groups continued to hold their meetings, but for most gatherings the showing of captioned films gradually stopped. At the same time, telecommunications advances had brought telephone access to deaf people and there was less need for face-to-face “live” communication. Together, the visual telecommunications and captioned television technologies profoundly impacted the way deaf people interacted.

Twitter is no longer taking action on tweets spreading misinformation about the 2020 US elections, the website has revealed to CNN. Elizabeth Busby, the company's spokesperson, told the news organization that the social network hasn't been enforcing its "civic integrity policy" when it comes to content about the Presidential elections for almost a year now — since March 2021. Busby said that's because the policy was meant to be used within the duration of an event and that President Biden has already been in office for more than a year.

The website amended its civic integrity policy before the Presidential elections to add labels to tweets with "false or misleading information intended to undermine public confidence in an election or other civic process." In some cases, Twitter could remove tweets under the policy. The rules cover tweets "inciting unlawful conduct to prevent a peaceful transfer of power or orderly succession." If you'll recall, former President Trump was banned on the social network following the 2021 Capitol attack after deciding that his tweets can be used to incite violence. The rules also cover unverified information "election rigging," which the administration's opponents are echoing until this day. In fact, YouTube has just removed a copy of a TV ad by Missouri Rep. Billy Long that claims "the Democrats rigged the election" in 2020.

YouTube spokesperson Ivy Choi explained the Google-owned website made it clear that "false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of the 2020 US presidential election" are prohibited on the platform. Long said YouTube's action was "un-American and straight from the communist playbook," though, and that it just proves "Big Tech certainly has and will continue to influence elections."

Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell has announced that she's removing all her music from Spotify. On her website, she published a short statement saying "irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives." She added that she stands with "Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue." While Mitchell didn't mention COVID-19 or Joe Rogan in particular, she linked to an open letter to Spotify from a group of scientists and doctors criticizing the host for "repeatedly spread[ing] misleading and false claims on his podcast, provoking distrust in science and medicine" throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. 

A few days ago, Young threatened to exit the platform and told his team that it was because "Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines." He also said that Spotify can have "[Joe] Rogan or Young. Not both." Mitchell and Young are friends and have both contracted polio as kids before the vaccine became available. Unsurprisingly, Spotify started deleting Young's catalog from the platform shortly after news about his stance came out, while also claiming that it's taking steps to remove disinformation from its service. 

The company said it pulled over 20,000 COVID-related podcast episodes since the beginning of the pandemic. Rogan's show, however, is still very much available. And that includes the controversial episode with Dr. Robert Malone, who claimed that "mass formation psychosis" led people to believe vaccines were effective in fighting COVID-19. Spotify inked an exclusive deal to host the The Joe Rogan Experience in 2020 and is believed to have paid over $100 million for it. The show is a key element in Spotify's quest to continue dominating the podcast space, so it really doesn't come as a surprise that it was Young's music that had to find a new home. 

Days after he was permanently banned from YouTube, Dan Bongino has also lost his ability to earn revenue from Google ads. On Friday, the Bongino Report Twitter account sent out a tweet suggesting Google had revoked the pundit’s AdSense account. Later that same day, Tech Policy Press confirmed the suspension with Google. The company told the outlet Bongino’s website had violated its AdSense publisher policies.

“We have strict publisher policies in place that explicitly prohibit misleading and harmful content around the COVID-19 pandemic and demonstrably false claims about our elections,” a Google spokesperson told Engadget. “When publishers persistently breach our policies we stop serving Google ads on their sites. Publishers can always appeal a decision once they have addressed any violating content.”

Bogino’s YouTube ban came down from Google after the Fox News host attempted to evade a prior suspension related to the platform’s COVID-19 misinformation policy. He posted a video to one of his accounts questioning the effectiveness of masks against the coronavirus. At that point, YouTube temporarily suspended Bogino. It then permanently banned him after he attempted to post that same video to another channel, thereby violating the platform’s terms of service.

On an episode of his podcast titled “I’m Daring YouTube to Do This,” Bogino said before the initial suspension he would continue to post videos about his claims on masks until the company took action. And while it appears he actively courted Google to ban him in both instances, the loss of AdSense revenue has the potential to hurt Bongino more than losing access to YouTube. On Twitter, Claire Atkin, the co-founder of Check My Ads, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting disinformation in the digital advertising industry, said the Gateway Pundit, a website that spread COVID-19 and election misinformation, lost $1.1 million in annual revenue after Google revoked its AdSense account.

Netflix is learning that careless dialogue in its fictional shows can have serious implications. Its bid to get a recent defamation suit dismissed has been rejected, meaning it will have to face the plaintiff — Georgian chess legend Nona Gaprindashvili — in court. 

In September, Gaprindashvili filed a suit against the streaming giant, accusing the company of defamation and "false light invasion of privacy." As the world's first female grandmaster, Gaprindashvili was mentioned in Netflix's series The Queen's Gambit — a period drama about a chess prodigy. 

In one scene during a chess match, a radio commentator says in passing "The only unusual thing about her, really, is her sex. And even that's not unique in Russia. There's Nona Gaprindashvili, but she's the female world champion and has never faced men."

According to the suit, not only is the allegation that Gaprindashvili hadn't faced men at that time "manifestly false," it's also "grossly sexist and belittling." It states that "By 1968, the year in which this episode is set, she had competed against at least 59 male chess players (28 of them simultaneously in one game), including at least ten Grandmasters of that time."

Stanley Sherman via Getty Images

The show is based on a 1983 novel by Walter Tevis that also mentions Gaprindashvili. However, the part which Netflix appears to have based this particular bit of its script on says, "The only unusual thing about her was her sex; and even that wasn't unique in Russia. There was Nona Gaprindashvili, not up to the level of this tournament, but a player who had met all these Russian Grandmasters many times before." Netflix's version is clearly different.

The streaming provider had moved to strike the case in November, saying in its filing that "the Series is a fictional work that a reasonable viewer would not construe as conveying fact." It also said that "a reasonable viewer would not draw the negative implication that Plaintiff alleges."

However, US District Judge Virginia Philips denied that motion today, writing that "the fact that the Series was a fictional work does not insulate Netflix from liability for defamation if all the elements of defamation are otherwise present."

The ruling also states that "at the very least, the line is dismissive of the accomplishments central to Plaintiff’s reputation." It also points out that, when filing its motion to dismiss, "Netflix’s own evidence demonstrates knowledge of the truth in its choice to deviate from the text of the Novel, which states that Plaintiff had faced the male Russian Grandmasters 'many times before.'"

Gaprindashvili is seeking damages of at least $5 million, as well as for Netflix to remove the statement that she never played men from the show. 

For the first time in its storied history, New York City’s annual Obie Awards will consider virtual, digital and audio productions, the event’s organizer, the American Theater Wing, announced on Friday. The move comes in response to the challenges Off- and Off-Off-Broadway artists and groups have had to face through the coronavirus pandemic. Due to some of the strictest lockdown restrictions in the country, many New York theater companies turned to online streaming to survive.

“We wanted to make sure that the work that did happen was eligible,” Heather Hitchens, the CEO and president of the American Theater Wing, told The New York Times. “The Obies respond to the season, and to the evolving nature and rhythms of theater.”

The American Theater Wing hasn’t decided on an exact date for this year’s show, but Hitchens told The Times she expects it will take place sometime in November and involve an in-person presentation. In addition to expanding the mandate of the Obies to honor online productions, judges will consider projects staged between July 1st, 2020 and August 31st, 2022. That's because the most recent Obie Awards took place in 2020. The American Theater Wing is also responsible for the Tony Awards, and 2022 will mark the first year that the organization will have staged the Obies on its own.  

It’s hard to say what the future will bring, particularly in the middle of a constantly changing pandemic, but the American Theater Wing’s decision to consider online productions could open the door for the Obies to consider shows staged outside of New York City.

Near the end of TikTok, Boom, content creator and beatboxer Spencer X chokes up. “TikTok has really changed my entire life,” he says while fighting back tears. He’s one of a few influencers profiled in the 90-minute documentary, which premiered at Sundance 2022 this weekend. It also features activist Feroza Aziz, best known for her viral video that slipped criticism of China’s treatment of Uighur Muslims into what initially appeared to be a makeup tutorial. Other subjects include reproductive rights activist Deja Foxx and Douyin content creator Jason Zhang, whose experiences with the app are all fascinating and moving.

Directed by Shalini Kantayya, TikTok, Boom is meant to “[dissect] one of the most influential platforms of the contemporary social media landscape." The film’s description on the Sundance festival portal says it “examines the algorithmic, sociopolitical, economic and cultural influences and impact of the history-making app.” Unfortunately, if you were hoping to learn anything new about why the For You algorithm is so creepily intuitive, why its parent company ByteDance collects so much data or what exactly are the app's ties to the Chinese government, you'll be disappointed.

In general, the documentary tries to cover too much. It jumped from Aziz finding a community of Afghan-Americans on the app, to X defying his parent’s expectations to make a career out of beatboxing, to sexism, racism, child predators, body image issues, TikTok’s creation and ByteDance’s history, all within the first 40 minutes. There’s discussion of the impact on creators’ mental health, Facebook’s interest in buying TikTok, the reinforcement of social disparities, China’s control and censorship, Trump’s rallies in Tulsa, the subsequent ban of the app and more. In the second half, there’s even a random dramatic reenactment of “a statement made by a former ByteDance employee” during the COVID-19 outbreak.

If TikTok, Boom was trying to catalog every time TikTok made the news, it did an admirable job. But in its effort to recap history, the film fails to deliver any insight. I could have easily Googled “TikTok timeline” and gotten all the same information without having to sit in front of my TV for 90 minutes. Had the documentary narrowed its focus, I suspect I would have learned more.

But in its effort to recap history, the film fails to deliver any insight.

I also have a small, but important gripe. The film needs more careful editors. It features B-roll and expert interviews correctly pronouncing and spelling the app Douyin that predated TikTok. Mere seconds later, the narrator and an onscreen graphic both mispronounce and misspell Douyin as “Duoyin.” Another spelling error: a list of so-called “Sensored words” in a graphic as opposed to “censored.”

Maybe I’m nit-picking, but mistakes like this affect the credibility of any documentary, which should be a well-researched piece of video journalism.

That leads me to my biggest problem with TikTok, Boom: It makes some dangerous assumptions. At one point in the film, an animated rendering insinuates that TikTok scans a user’s face while they’re watching videos and determines if they’re smiling or not. The film posits that this information is then fed into the algorithm that lets ByteDance recommend more content on your For You page.

There is no evidence that TikTok does this. In fact, unless Apple and Google’s privacy indicators (which show when your phone’s cameras are being used) are malfunctioning, people would know if an app was watching them. It’s more likely that the TikTok, Boom team misinterpreted terms in the app’s privacy policy that states it’s collecting “faceprints and voiceprints.”

Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

That’s not to say ByteDance is completely in the clear here; it’s never explicitly explained why it’s gathering that data. Other parts of its privacy policy are even more alarming, like the fact that ByteDance collects information about users’ "keystroke patterns or rhythms." In 2020, the company had to publicly admit wrongdoing and agree to stop accessing users’ clipboard data every few keystrokes. Back then, it claimed this was part of an anti-spam feature. Now, the latest versions of iOS and Android will alert you if an app has accessed or pasted content from your clipboard, so you can be aware of unnecessary data collection.

Look, I get it. The For You algorithm can be so uncanny that people scramble to find nefarious reasons for its effectiveness. It’s just like when we all wondered if Instagram and Facebook were listening to our conversations to serve us eerily timely ads. But it’s one thing for individuals to wonder if your phone is spying on you and a whole other problem if a documentary recklessly claims it’s happening. The filmmakers don’t seem to realize the responsibility it has to its viewers.

In fact, had TikTok, Boom just focused on breaking down the For You algorithm or studying exactly what data the app is collecting (and in that context its ties to China), the film might have unearthed something illuminating. Instead, it ends up being a mostly redundant recap with a catchy title.