I’ve always felt that freedom of speech is very important, but a good person knows there’s a limit to what you can really say in various circumstances. That’s just because you have a social awareness. Perhaps you can even call that social skills. Certain things are just better kept to yourself as a personal opinion.
In music, artists have always fought against censorship and thus freedom of speech, usually so lyrics can get even more explicit about sex, but I was actually surprised to hear that there’s a lot of hate songs out there, apparently. Not the Kelis momentary expression of release about a love gone bad in “I hate you so much right now”, but just full on senseless hate towards other races and spreading hate as a deliberate attempt to stir trouble between races.
Very naively, I just assumed that every streaming platform (as well as social media platform, BTW) wants to be a positive place and would have policies in place that certain things are not allowed. Usually website hosts do have those policies.
After Charlottesville (USA), last weekend, it turned out that streaming services (and social media) actually allowed more than what I consider to be ok. Both Facebook and Spotify immediately took action, removing hate from their platforms.
Spotify removed some music, but the press was quick to point out that it wasn’t all removed and that other platforms have not appeared to have gotten inspired to follow Spotify’s lead. I really hope they do though. Music should spread love and positivity. It’s easy to argue that music is emotion, regardless of what that emotion may be – whether it’s good or bad, but when you release music, share music, I think the same common sense should apply and for me that means you want to spread something positive. You want to inspire positively and spreading hate has no place in that.
Update: Other streaming services have now removed hate music as well. They pretty much did so at the time this blog originally went live.
