Spotify’s new comments feature tries to solve a longtime moderation problem

Spotify announced this week the rollout of a comments feature on its podcasts. But we’ve already seen other tools’ and websites’ comment sections devolve over the years into hate speech and polarization.

Spotify’s solution to this dilemma? Creator self-moderation.

Rather than granting everyone the ability to publish their own comments, Spotify is making creators weed through the comments and decide what to publish. Some have already critiqued this creator-dependent approach, claiming it will kill any chance at free expression. Others say it will unduly burden podcasters, forcing them to moderate derogatory comments. Still, these are early stages. All Spotify is looking for is an initial stab at the moderation puzzle.

“For the launch experience, we over-indexed on giving creators more control,” says Maya Prohovnik, Spotify’s vice president of podcast product.

Self-moderation puts a significant burden on podcasters

Spotify users will have an easier time than ever submitting feedback; rather than reaching creators through another app like X or Facebook, they essentially have an open DM channel in-app. Lena Frischlich, a media psychologist at the University of Southern Denmark, is skeptical that self-moderation will work as well as Spotify is hoping, and points out that podcasters on both sides of the aisle already receive a ton of hate mail, even death threats, from listeners.

“Podcasts are a space where societal debates happen, [which] can attract a lot of backlash,” Frischlich says. “It can be very personal and it can be very hurtful. For the targets of these types of mass harassment, it can lead to negative emotions [and] traumatic experiences.”

This threat of unmoderated vitriol is doubled by the ability to remain almost entirely anonymous. Spotify accounts have usernames, but they frequently don’t include full names or identifiers. For Kevin Wallsten, professor of political science at California State University Long Beach, this increases the likelihood of angry, hateful comments.

“If Spotify is having the comments be anonymous, you can anticipate that they will be of a different character than if you can trace them back to a particular person,” Wallsten says. “That’s one of the major determinants of how low the quality of discourse is.”

Could self-moderation stifle any engagement?

While podcasters are fielding this barrage of unmoderated comments, they also have almost no incentive to publish thoughtfully critical or reactive takes. Rather, many could be willed to only publish the positive comments, effectively crushing any two-sided discussion.

Wallsten believes that the drive for engagement may be more of a mission statement than a practice for Spotify. Self-moderated and self-published comments, he reasons, is the safe way out.

“It’s the least dangerous path toward presenting the facade of user engagement without actually investing any effort in content moderation, because that’s outsourced to the podcasters, and without exposing yourself to the potential harms of comment sections,” Wallsten says.

Spotify maintains that the function is built for user engagement, even if some of the standard interactive functions are missing or controlled. They’re holding back on functions like user-published comments and the ability to reply to another user’s comment, primarily so they can test the field.

“[We’re] taking a deliberately slow and measured approach as we test out these systems,” says Spotify’s Prohovnik, “and the ways we extend the feature will depend on the feedback we get from creators and Spotify users.”