'They're desperate': Joe Rogan rails against YouTube's apparent censorship of Trump interview

Earlier this week, Americans experienced difficulty tracking down President Donald Trump's three-hour interview with Joe Rogan on YouTube, which presently has over 41.5 million views on the Google-owned platform. The hotly anticipated interview was also glaringly absent from the platform's trending page on Monday.

Rather than connect would-be viewers with the unfiltered interview, YouTube inundated users with results for antagonistic legacy media reports about the interview and unrelated videos — a redirection strategy that Rogan indicated had a dramatic impact on traffic.

Rogan blasted YouTube on the Wednesday episode of his show, telling stand-up comic Francis Foster and political commentator Konstantin Kisin that the apparent censorship effort reeked of desperation.

"There's no way this was a mistake," said Rogan. "That's too convenient."

The titular host of "The Joe Rogan Experience" noted that he initially gave YouTube the benefit of the doubt: "I'm like, 'I'm sure it was a mistake. There's no way that it was on purpose.' And so if you googled 'Rogan Trump,' you could only get clips. You couldn't watch the whole episode. You couldn't find it."

'There is massive far left censorship at Google/YouTube.'

David Heinemeier Hansson, the co-owner of the software company Basecamp, shared footage of his unsuccessful attempt to find the interview on Monday, tweeting, "Tried to find the Rogan/Trump interview on YouTube but no matter what I search, it's not coming up. Would be beyond bonkers if they're actively trying to suppress it. Must be a glitch, right?"

Hansson, whose original concerns were amplified by Rogan, noted further that numerous variations of his search, including "jre trump" and "trump on rogan," similarly failed to produce the desired result.

Rogan told Foster and Kisin that not only could potential voters not find the video, YouTube refused to highlight the Trump interview in its trending section, despite the video far surpassing the competition by leaps and bounds. He indicated that this omission revealed either that the section is meaningless or that something foul was afoot.

According to Rogan, amid YouTube's apparent election-time censorship attempts, Elon Musk — who stressed that "there is massive far left censorship at Google/YouTube" and noted that "Alphabet (Google/YouTube) is the #1 biggest donor to the Democratic Party" — reached out to Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, successfully porting the entire interview to X to ensure its visibility.

"So now it has way more views," said Rogan, referring to the tens of millions of additional views it has since netted on Musk's platform.

'They hate it because ideologically they're opposed to the idea of him being more popular.'

"You can't suppress s***. It doesn't work," said Rogan. "This is the internet. This is 2024. People are going to realize what you're doing. If you try to make it so that something can't come up in a search engine because it's too popular — first of all, if that's not trending, then you tell me what the f*** is."

YouTube said in a statement Monday evening:

Since airing Friday, the interview has generated over 34 million views on YouTube and counting, making it Joe Rogan's most viewed episode of the year. For some searches on Monday the original 3-hour interview didn't appear prominently. Short excerpts uploaded by the Joe Rogan channel appeared, but we know it was frustrating for users looking to find the full video. We've worked to resolve this and viewers will begin seeing the full podcast in more YouTube search results soon.

While Rogan indicated that the censorship was unmistakable, he expressed openness to the possibility that rather than an institutional effort on the part of Google to once again interfere for the ostensible benefit of Democrats, "it could have been like some rogue engineer. There's a lot of people that are working behind the scenes."

According to OpenSecrets, individuals at Google's parent company, Alphabet, have donated over $2.2 million to the Harris campaign this election cycle, as well as $1.6 million to the Harris super PAC Future Forward USA and millions more to congressional and Senate Democrats.

Google has also been accused in recent months of manipulating the autocomplete feature for its search engine to suppress information about Donald Trump. An attorney for Alphabet Inc. admitted to Congress in August that the autocomplete tool for its search function hid results about an ActBlue donor's attempt on Trump's life in Pennsylvania.

Earlier this year, Google also reportedly killed a pro-Trump ad for a supposed "policy violation."

"I think they're desperate because they had no idea it was going to be that popular," said Rogan. "It's a runaway train, and they hate it because ideologically they're opposed to the idea of him being more popular."

BlazeTV host Steve Deace recently underscored the social and political significance of the interview, writing, "The benefit of this interview for candidate Trump could be equivalent to the largest and most expensive media ad buy in political history — something unattainable given the resources and precise messaging required to pull it off effectively."

Rogan suggested that leftists largely control "these massive media distribution companies like YouTube or Facebook. They're massive companies. They have so much influence on everything. And they didn't like that this one was slipping away."

Google's antipathy for Trump is likely not all ideological. In 2020, Trump signed an executive order with the aim of limiting legal protections for social media companies and signaled a desire to implement new regulations on Big Tech.

"Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube wield immense, if not unprecedented, power to shape the interpretation of public events; to censor, delete, or disappear information; and to control what people see or do not see," wrote Trump. "As President, I have made clear my commitment to free and open debate on the internet."

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