It was the most popular podcast in the world. So why couldn’t I find it anywhere? The Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump has passed 37 million views, but yesterday on YouTube, it was nowhere to be found.
I tried typing in “joe rogan trump,” “joe rogan trump full interview,” you name it. But the only way to find the episode was to go to the podcast’s YouTube profile and hunt for it.
Countless viewers had the same problem. So is this just a technical glitch, or is YouTube censoring Trump?
An Algorithmic Glitch?
On a recent episode of This Week in Startups, host Jason Calacanis said that the problem may be a quirk in the YouTube algorithm. It can prioritize short videos over long ones.
I don’t think this is the culprit. I’ve had no problem finding other full interviews from JRE, including a great one with Chamath.
Mass Reporting?
A more likely possibility: mass reporting of the Trump interview.
An anonymous account on Twitter claims a Google employee contacted him to tell him that the video could’ve been marked as spam. This can happen when a lot of people report a video.
There’s no way to verify this claim. But it’s not hard to imagine a bunch of lefties reporting the interview simply because they don’t like Trump.
Plain Old Censorship
Another possibility is that Google intentionally censored the video. We don’t have evidence of that, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
YouTube has a history of censoring political content. Other social media platforms like Facebook and pre-Elon Twitter routinely did the same, often working with the government to remove information.
If Google did censor it, I hope a whistleblower tells us.
Better Alternatives to YouTube
There are two possibilities here: either YouTube search stinks or they’re censoring content. Either way, I’m not wild about using it.
I suggest you do what I did: listen to the podcast in your podcast player. These players operate over an open standard called RSS, which cannot be censored.
Rogan also uploaded the entire episode to Twitter, which you can see above. That’s a great option for content creators because Twitter will not censor you, unlike other platforms.
Wrap-Up
As of today, I’m able to find the interview on YouTube. But what really happened here?
YouTube either dropped the ball or purposely tried to interfere with the election.
For what it’s worth, I loved the Rogan/Trump interview. As you listen to them chat for 3 hours, Trump doesn’t feel like the monster the media makes him out to be.
He feels human.
Whatever our politics, I hope we can agree that censorship is wrong. And I hope to hear Harris on the show soon!
More on tech:
From $50 Million to $50 Billion: Thomas Laffont at the All-In Summit
Meet My Latest Investment: PodcastAI
Talking Investment Red Flags on the Mr. Bray Labs Podcast
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