YouTube, Google accused of censorship as Joe Rogan’s Trump interview nearly impossible to find
Podcaster Joe Rogan’s highly-watched interview with former President Donald Trump has racked up more than 35 million views but fans searching for it on YouTube may have a hard time finding it — leading to accusations of censorship against the Google-owned site.
A search on YouTube using the terms “Joe Rogan Trump” or “Joe Rogan Donald Trump” did not bring up Friday’s three-hour sit-down at the top of the list. The Spotify interview also was notably absent from YouTube’s trending page on Monday.
Instead, users were offered results of videos from traditional media outlets, like The Hill, MSNBC and Fox News, and their coverage of the interview.
An unrelated clip from “Saturday Night Live” even topped the results ahead of Rogan’s interview.
The difficulty in finding the video has led many Trump fans to accuse Google of censorship ahead of next week’s 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 said in a post on X. “There is no sensible explanation for this, and if deliberate, Google is overtly interfering with the elections.”
Musk responded to the user’s post in agreement: “Unreal.”
Google did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
The search giant has faced similar accusations of spitting out negative articles about Trump as the main query results when seeking election coverage.
When users searched YouTube for “joe rogan,” the interview did pop up near the top of the results page.
Viewers have left a flood of comments underneath the interview accusing YouTube of foul play.
One user questioned why a search for the interview on Google populated anti-Trump results.
The user included a screenshot of a story at the top of the Google results page from The Arizona Republic titled “Opinion: Donald Trump’s Joe Rogan interview was a brain-rotted waste of 3 hours.”
“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 also accused Google of censoring the video when it was initially posted.
The video was “unlisted” when it was first uploaded to YouTube, so it did not appear in any search results.
Rogan clarified that the “unlisted” video was just a glitch with Spotify, not a result of 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.”
