From a standard “First Amendment” perspective, Spotify is a private business, not the U.S. government or an arm of the U.S. government, and thus its private decisions about what music to promote or not promote are not “censorship” in the legal sense (although an argument can be made that businesses like Twitter or Spotify have become something of an essential public utility, like the phone company, so that even though they’re private businesses, they should not be allowed to censor content in the same way as Verizon would not be permitted to ban someone using its phone network for “hate speech”). However, I never argued that Spotify’s conduct falls into any technical legal definition of censorship. My argument was simply that Spotify’s decision to ban or refuse to promote artists based on “hate content” or “hateful conduct” threatens to take it down a slippery slope with no logical stopping point. My point wasn’t that Spotify can’t do this, but rather, that it shouldn’t, and, of course, regardless of whether Spotify is a private business, we can, as consumers, always make arguments to try to persuade businesses that they should or shouldn’t do something and that their course of conduct may even affect our purchasing decisions.