Popular podcaster Joe Rogan’s interview with former President Donald Trump went dark on YouTube shortly after it was posted on Friday, leaving some viewers to suspect Big Tech was squashing Trump’s appearance on purpose.
But Rogan took to social media himself to put the rumor to bed.
There is no issue with YouTube censoring the trump episode. It was just supposed to go live on both Spotify and YouTube at the same time and there was a glitch in Spotify’s upload system and so we delisted the YouTube link until it’s fixed. It should be fine now
— Joe Rogan (@joerogan) October 26, 2024
“There is no issue with YouTube censoring the trump episode,” Rogan wrote.
“It was just supposed to go live on both Spotify and YouTube at the same time and there was a glitch in Spotify’s upload system and so we delisted the YouTube link until it’s fixed. It should be fine now.”
Rogan’s fans welcomed the news.
Still, the immediate suspicion is understandable.
Trump supporters — and conservatives in general — have plenty of reasons to be wary when it comes to their treatment on social media platforms.
Google-owned YouTube, as well as Facebook and the company formerly known as Twitter in its days before being purchased by mega-billionaire free-speech champion Elon Musk have a history of squelching conservative viewpoints.
(Twitter and Facebook censorship of the New York Post and its expose about the Hunter Biden laptop in the weeks before the 2020 election should go down in history as one of the great, most distasteful political information manipulation episodes in American history.)
And if leftists wanted to squelch an interview, the Trump-Rogan podcast would have been a prime target.
The former — and potentially future — president touched on a wide range of topics during the three-hour conversation, including whom he considers “the enemy within.”
As of late Saturday morning Eastern Daylight Time, the episode has amassed more than 11.8 million views.
Check it out here:
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A Trump-Rogan interview would be big news in political circles under any circumstances. But with only 10 days to go before the Nov. 5 election, every twist and turn in the political landscape is taking on an outsized importance.
Social media companies have given plenty of reasons for conservatives to think that Friday’s podcast would be targeted.
But it wasn’t censorship this time.
