Spotify’s opioid-promoting podcast problem was a lot bigger than initially thought.
US Sen. Maggie Hassan says the music streaming giant told her office that it took down tens of thousands of podcasts promoting the drugs last year after her office raised concerns about the issue.
Business Insider first flagged the problem in May 2025, reporting that over 200 Spotify podcasts were peddling opioids, which were removed. CNN also found dozens of such podcasts in a later investigation.
Hassan, a Democrat from New Hampshire, says Spotify told her office that, through November 2025, the company had removed over 57,000 podcast episodes, including over 3,000 shows and 3,500 accounts promoting illegal drugs.
In a statement, Hassan’s office said Spotify slow-walked enforcement despite months of correspondence and didn’t report any of the content it removed to law enforcement.
This lack of reporting was especially concerning given that one of the episodes flagged by the senator included a link to a drug-selling website that was later seized by law enforcement, including the Drug Enforcement Administration, Hassan said in the statement.
“Failure to swiftly detect and remove dangerous content and also report it to law enforcement can lead to harrowing consequences — whether that’s a teenager who buys drugs online that could be laced with deadly fentanyl or a senior who falls for a scam that wipes out their retirement savings,” Hassan said.
Spotify denied to Business Insider that it was slow to act, saying it began purging the podcasts as soon as it became aware of them in May 2025.
“We have a 24/7 operation in place to tackle these evolving threats, and we are regularly identifying and removing content that violates our guidelines,” a Spotify spokesperson said.
Spotify also said the episodes were part of a much larger spam operation meant to boost visibility on other websites, not a direct attempt to sell drugs to Spotify users.
“Drugs cannot be bought or sold on Spotify,” the spokesperson added.
The podcasts in question were largely devoid of spoken content and failed to attract meaningful engagement, Spotify said, according to a June report compiled by Sen. Hassan’s office. The report also cited Business Insider’s reporting.
Spotify didn’t directly respond to Sen. Hassan’s claim that it failed to report any of the episodes to authorities, telling Business Insider that it has “a long history of working with law enforcement when content violates the law.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
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