As calls have grown louder for Spotify to institute a misinformation and disinformation policy on its platform, the firm finally did so on Sunday.

In a blog post written by Spotify chief executive officer, Daniel Ek, Spotify outlined how it plans to battle misinformation. Spoilers, it’s not all very good.

The CEO pointed users to Spotify’s rules which now explicitly includes the following point about medical misinformation or disinformation under the “Dangerous Content” section:

“Content that promotes dangerous false or dangerous deceptive medical information that may cause offline harm or poses a direct threat to public health includes, but may not be limited to:

• asserting that AIDS, COVID-19, cancer or other serious life threatening diseases are a hoax or not real
• encouraging the consumption of bleach products to cure various illnesses and diseases
• promoting or suggesting that vaccines approved by local health authorities are designed to cause death
• encouraging people to purposely get infected with COVID-19 in order to build immunity to it (e.g. promoting or hosting “coronavirus parties”).”

According to Ek, Spotify is also working on adding a content advisory to any podcast that includes a discussion about COVID-19. This advisory is similar to what YouTube and other social media platforms have implemented, that is, a box-out with a link to trusted resources.

“This new effort to combat misinformation will roll out to countries around the world in the coming days,” says Ek.

That’s about all Spotify is doing here and it looks like listeners will need to manually report misinformation and that’s where we found an issue.

This morning while trying to report a podcast for misinformation we went to this URL as advised by Spotify. First off, despite being logged into our account when trying to file a report regarding Dangerous Content were asked to input a verification code. Upon supplying this verification code which was emailed to us, we were met with this screen.

The problem here is that URL’s are not visible to us on web or the mobile app. Copying and pasting the link to the podcast or episode simply kicks out an error and that means the process dies. As far as reporting mechanisms go, this is worse than should be acceptable from a company as large as Spotify.

This really is less than the bare minimum considering Spotify’s reporting doesn’t work at all.

What this highlight’s is a problem that has plagued the likes of YouTube for years – content moderation is not easy. Automated solutions are not very good and often kick out false-positives but on the other hand, the amount of content being created means that human moderation is a costly, time consuming exercise.

This doesn’t paint a very good picture for Spotify though as users and artists continue to call for a departure from the platform.

At least they have Joe Rogan though right?