A look into Apple and Spotify’s podcast content has found the platforms hosting numerous shows with racist and sometimes violent content.
Canadian Anti-Hate Network
Some of the largest and most popular platforms for podcasts are providing a home for racist, hateful and sometimes violent rhetoric.
Far from isolated incidents, thousands of content creators are using podcasts to push far-right politics. Their episodes are being made available to the public by some of the world’s biggest companies.
As the popularity of podcasts has grown substantially over the past five years, how to manage and moderate the massive collections of material has long been a concern. Spotify alone is home to somewhere around four million episodes, and the number grows every day.
White all the platforms have rules against hate speech, how and when they are enforced can be selective. Take Canadian live streamer and Diagolon concept creator Jeremy MacKenzie. In episode 483 of his “RageCast,” MacKenzie targets South Asian people, stating “I wish Winston Churchill had genocided your entire race of people.”
“Did you go outside today, did you do anything today? Indians,” he adds.
Later on the same stream he added, “Fuck the Jews, fuck you. Fuck your holocaust…I wish the fucking Palestinians just overrun and wipe out your entire civilization.”
The Raging Dissident podcast is made up of audio-only uploads of his live stream which is also broadcast over a variety of video platforms.
The episode was either removed or never posted to Spotify. A quick review of MacKenzie’s podcast feed reveals several missing episodes, all of which are still on Apple Podcasts, the native podcast application for the iPhone and iPad.
Unlike Spotify, Apple offers machine-generated transcripts of many of its podcasts. This service accurately captured MacKenize’s statement about Indian people, along with other militant statements.
The Canadian Anti-Hate Network reviewed several white nationalist or far-right podcasts available through Apple and Spotify, including both Canadian shows and those for international audiences.
One of the most interesting entries is the Canadian podcast, Blood Satellite, which appears on both Spotify and Apple’s Podcast app. A blend of ironic and deeply baked references to online culture, technological accelerationism, and far-right politics, the podcast includes interviews with influential figures in the radical right-wing and discussions of esoteric themes related to the ideology.
This includes interviews with Dr. Ricardo Duchesne, a University of New Brunswick professor who retired early after using his classroom to spout ideas that were “racist and without academic merit,” according to an open letter signed by over 100 of his colleagues.
Significantly more well-known is Andrew Tate, whose “The Real World” podcast is still publishing occasional episodes on Apple’s Podcasts and Spotify. Tate is currently facing multiple accusations of trafficking and abusing women in Romania.
Tate is part of the manosphere, which the Institute for Strategic Dialogue defines as “an umbrella term that refers to a number of interconnected misogynistic communities. It encompasses multiple types and severities of misogyny – from broader male supremacist discourse to men’s rights activism (MRA) and ‘involuntary celibates’ (incels).”
Shows like The Nephalim Death Squad offer a conspiratorial look through biblical history, Holocaust denial, and will also mispronounce the word “Jewish” during their episodes to avoid automatic moderation tools that may detect the language. The show is available through Spotify and also does not appear on Apple.
Spotify and Apple Podcasts are two of the most used aggregators of podcasts in the world. Both require a submission process from creators, but this process does not involve vetting the content. Rather all it takes is a regular output of episodes and an active RSS feed—a common method for quickly disseminating podcasts across multiple websites, applications, and more.
There have been several publicized attempts by companies to clamp down on some of the worst offenders for spreading false and misleading information as well as hate speech. This included Apple removing content by Alex Jones and his Infowars company, infamous for its conspiracy theories, including that the Sandy Hook school shooting was faked. Spotify took similar action at the time.
Spotify in particular has spent a reported $1 billion on acquiring exclusive access to popular and original shows. This includes the Joe Rogan Experience, which has included repeated guests from the far-right (including Alex Jones) and others that critics accused of spreading false information about the COVID-19 virus and vaccine.
The public backlash to inaccurate health information included a letter signed by 270 physicians and scientists demanding that Spotify create misinformation policies. Spotify made several updates to its policies and created a Safety Advisory Council. It then bought the digital moderation company Kinzen in 2022, after having them on contract since 2020.
The Canadian Anti-Hate Network reached out to Spotify and Apple through their media contacts for comment but did not hear back by publication.
In addition to podcasts, hateful music has been noted on music streaming services like iTunes and Spotify for years. In 2017 reporters found multiple white nationalist bands with their music available for listening or downloading.
Spotify told Billboard Magazine at the time that “illegal content or material that favours hatred or incites violence against race, religion, sexuality or the like is not tolerated by us.”
The $44 million lawsuit against the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, the government, and banks failed to show any evidence of CAHN involvement in a (non-existent) wide-ranging conspiracy.
Bubba Pollock is awaiting sentencing after being convicted of criminal harassment against a member of the 2SLGBTQ+ community, after he taunted her with photos he took of her sleeping father in a hospital room.
