The recent interview between podcaster Joe Rogan and former President Donald Trump has drawn over 35 million views, but finding the video on YouTube has proven difficult for fans. This has led to accusations of censorship against YouTube’s parent company, Google.
On YouTube, searches using keywords like “Joe Rogan Trump” or “Joe Rogan Donald Trump” did not immediately display the three-hour discussion from Friday near the top of the results. Additionally, the widely viewed interview was missing from YouTube’s trending page as of Monday.
Instead of the Rogan-Trump interview, users were shown content from traditional media outlets, including clips from The Hill, MSNBC, and Fox News discussing the interview.
Surprisingly, an unrelated skit from “Saturday Night Live” even appeared higher in the search results than the actual interview video.
The difficulty in locating the video has led some Trump supporters to accuse Google of trying to suppress the interview’s visibility in the days leading up to the election.
“YouTube does not return the link to the full Joe Rogan/Trump interview no matter how I try to search for it,” one user posted on X. “There is no sensible explanation for this, and if deliberate, Google is overtly interfering with the elections.”
Musk responded to this comment with a simple: “Unreal.”
Google has yet to reply to The Post’s request for a statement on the matter.
The tech giant has previously been accused of prioritizing negative articles about Trump in search results, especially around election-related queries.
When searching specifically for “joe rogan” on YouTube, the interview did appear closer to the top of the search results.
Comments flooded the video, with many viewers claiming YouTube had acted to suppress the interview.
One person pointed out that a general Google search for the interview brought up anti-Trump articles instead.
The user shared a screenshot showing a Google result from The Arizona Republic with the headline, “Opinion: Donald Trump’s Joe Rogan interview was a brain-rotted waste of 3 hours,” as the top result.
“How did The Arizona Republic rocket to the top of search results for Joe Rogan Trump interview? I wonder,” the user wrote.
“Wow,” Musk replied.
Fans had raised similar concerns of censorship when the video was initially released.
Upon its first upload to YouTube, the video was “unlisted,” meaning it wasn’t visible in search results.
Rogan clarified that the “unlisted” status was actually a technical error with Spotify, not due to any intentional blacklisting.
“There is no issue with YouTube censoring the trump episode,” Rogan wrote in a post on X on Friday. “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.”
{Matzav.com}
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