Rivera is one of 270 doctors, physicians, and science educators who signed an open letter calling on Spotify, which obtained exclusively streaming rights to the Joe Rogan Experience in a r eported $100 million deal, to take action against misinformation on the platform, such as that contained in the interview with Malone. “When I saw they were falling victim to this, I spoke to some colleagues and we said something has to be done at this point,” she says. Yet Rivera was even more horrified to discover that people in her life, whom she considered to be “quite wise and discerning,” were hoodwinked by Malone’s patina of academic credibility, considering his views on the vaccine legitimate. The episode featuring Malone went viral, and was shared widely in right-wing media circles as well as on Facebook, where the link on Spotify has been shared nearly 25,000 times, according to CrowdTangle data. When she watched the interview, she was horrified to see that he espoused various conspiratorial and baseless beliefs, from the idea that “mass formation psychosis” is responsible for people believing in the efficacy of vaccines to the claim popular among anti-vaxxers that hospitals are financially incentivized to falsely diagnose Covid-19 deaths. She knew that Malone had been banned from Twitter for promoting Covid-19 misinformation, and that he had been making the rounds in conservative media circles undermining the efficacy of the vaccine. Rivera was familiar with Rogan, as well as Malone.

Robert Malone, a virologist who touts himself as one of the architects of mRNA technology. A few weeks ago, her followers started sending her a link to an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, the most popular podcast in the world. As an infectious disease epidemiologist and research fellow at Boston’s Children’s Hospital who debunks health misinformation on Instagram -where she has more than 380,000 followers - Jessica Malaty Rivera regularly receives tips from her followers about viral content to debunk.

Spotify joe rogan peter mccullough