this post was submitted on 17 May 2025
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Spotify caught hosting hundreds of fake podcasts that advertise selling drugs (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

You’re saying that Spotify don’t have employee moderators for uploaded podcasts, which they do. In this era of every person thinking they’re an influencer and everyone needs to hear what they say, the issue is that likely no matter how many they have, the number of episodes that get uploaded will always dwarf them, so they rely on their auto-moderators to find the most egregious rule breakers. They can’t catch everything there though. If a customer finds a rule breaker and reports it, they’ll take action - that’s good!

The alternative is that every single episode of every single podcast has to be manually reviewed and approved before it goes live, which is not feasible.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 hours ago

Please take a look into the articles. That really was something that a good moderation team should find and they really didn't need to listen to every podcast:

The intention of many of these pages is obvious from their names. Podcasts with titles, such as “My Adderall Store” — which has a link in the episode description to a site that purportedly sells Adderall, as well as potentially addictive pain medications like Oxycodone and Vicodin, among other drugs — were listed within the first 50 suggested results, a CNN review this week found. CNN identified dozens of these fake podcasts across Spotify, advertising sales of medications ranging from Methadone to Ambien, in some cases claiming that the drugs can be purchased without a prescription, which is illegal in the United States.