House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan accused YouTube’s parent company of censoring former President Donald Trump’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
Mr. Jordan wrote that tech giant Alphabet, which owns Google and YouTube, “appears to have censored the video of Joe Rogan’s recent interview with President Donald Trump” on YouTube.
“We write to seek an immediate briefing on (1) YouTube’s decision to censor Joe Rogan’s interview with President Trump; and (2) Google Search’s elevation of material critical of the interview,” Mr. Jordan wrote to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.
The lawmaker said that three days after Mr. Rogan’s interview was posted on YouTube, users began reporting difficulty finding the video in searches. He cited a report from the New York Post that found that searches “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.”
Instead, those keywords yielded results from media outlets covering the interview, including The Hill, MSNBC and Fox News, while searches with the same key words on Google “populated anti-Trump results.”
Mr. Jordan wrote that YouTube acknowledged “the censorship” of Mr. Rogan’s interview in a statement that read, “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.”
The day the video was uploaded on Oct. 25, Mr. Rogan said on X that “there is no issue with YouTube censoring the Trump episode” and pointed to “a glitch” in Spotify’s upload system that caused the episode to not go live on both YouTube and the streaming platform.
“So we delisted the YouTube link until it’s fixed,” he said. “It should be fine now.”
However, once reports of users having issues emerged, Mr. Rogan posted the full video on his X in response account and said on the most recent episode of his podcast that “there’s no way it was a mistake, that’s too convenient, but it could have been like some rogue engineer.”
Mr. Jordan demanded that Alphabet answer a series of questions by Nov. 13, including if the alleged censorship was done automatically or manually, who at the company was responsible for the video not appearing on YouTube’s top search results, if other videos featuring Mr. Trump were kept from top search results and whether the company had communications with the Biden-Harris administration regarding the interview.
“Americans deserve access to political speech, especially in the closing weeks before an election,” Mr. Jordan wrote. “Given the company’s recent history of censorship, including at the behest of the Biden-Harris Administration, YouTube’s censorship of former President Trump is particularly troubling.”
Mr. Rogan has also left the door open for Vice President Kamala Harris to appear on the show and said that her campaign has “not passed on an interview.” But the Harris campaign wanted Mr. Rogan to travel for the interview and would only allow a one-hour interview, which put the conversation on ice.
“I strongly feel the best way to do it is in the studio in Austin,” Mr. Rogan said. “My sincere wish is to just have a nice conversation and get to know her as a human being. I really hope we can make it happen.”
