MRC Tested YouTube on Burying Rogan-Trump Interview. Here’s What We Found

HEATHER MOON

NOVEMBER 1, 2024

Google-owned YouTube is still finding new ways to interfere in the 2024 presidential election, suppressing a three-hour Rogan interview of Trump.

Scarcely more than a week before the 2024 presidential election, YouTube stymied users’ efforts to search for and find the recent episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast featuring former President and GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump. This is despite the fact that the interview was one of the most anticipated episodes of the most popular Spotify podcast in the U.S. and that the episode reportedly saw more than 28 million views in just the first two days it was available. MRC tested YouTube’s search function after the platform supposedly fixed the problem and found that Google-owned YouTube is still suppressing Rogan’s interview with Trump.

Shortly after the Rogan-Trump interview aired, users reported that when searching YouTube with standard search terms like “Joe Rogan Trump,” the episode did not appear at the top of search results. In some cases the interview did not appear even on the entire first page of results. Instead, YouTube served up clips and commentaries about the episode as well as media reports about it including from leftist outlets such as MSNBC, The Hill and others.

MRC Free Speech America found that although YouTube has corrected the results for some of these search terms there are still some reasonable search terms that should return a link to the wildly popular episode but don’t. For example, at the time of publication, a search for “donald trump rogan” returns the Rogan interview with Sen. J.D. Vance at the top of the results and the Trump interview as the fifth result. A search for “trump rogan” is showing the Vance interview as the fourth result and users must scroll down below the “People also watched” section to find the Trump interview. 

MRC Free Speech America pointed out the continued suppression of the episode under these other common search terms to YouTube when requesting comment for this story and did not receive a response.

Rogan addressed the censorship in a subsequent podcast, sarcastically claiming that he is “sure it was a mistake.”

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) addressed the censorship in a letter to YouTube parent company Alphabet in which he demanded answers.

The MRC Free Speech America CensorTrack database contains 534 cases of YouTube censorship collected since March of 2020. 

YouTube failed to respond to MRC Free Speech America’s request for a comment by the time of publication.