If you had trouble searching YouTube on Monday for the full Donald Trump interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast, you weren’t alone.
I first noticed there was an issue with YouTube surfacing the episode via a tweet from David Heinemeier Hansson, the co-founder of Basecamp and the creator of the Ruby on Rails. The issue? If you tried to search YouTube for something like “Joe Rogan Trump” on Monday, the way most people would have probably tried to find the podcast episode if they weren’t already subscribed to Rogan’s channel, you’d have only gotten some YouTube shorts; some relevant segments from cable channels like MSNBC; and clips from the full Trump interview.
I was able to replicate the issue, and also noticed that if you tried a similar query with Rogan’s other recent guests (like Brian Cox and Luke Bryan), YouTube pulled up their full episodes just fine.
“Tried to find the Rogan/Trump interview on YouTube but no matter what I search, it’s not coming up,” Hansson tweeted via his @DHH account (a tweet, I should add, that’s racked up 2.2 million views on X as of this writing). “Would be beyond bonkers if they’re actively trying to suppress it. Must be a glitch, right?”
I was able to pull up the full episode of Rogan’s podcast with the Trump interview Monday night by searching YouTube for “Joe Rogan Trump,” after having tried unsuccessfully throughout the day. Importantly, you could also always go directly to Rogan’s channel and watch the interview there, as millions of people have done so far (video of the full Trump episode has pulled in 35 million views on YouTube as of this writing).
Still, the fact that video of the episode didn’t come up in YouTube searches for it on Monday led to speculation that YouTube might be suppressing it somehow, perhaps based on some of Trump’s comments in the episode. Ironically, YouTube also surfaced a clip of Joe Rogan’s reaction to his Trump interview on Monday, while making it hard to find the actual episode. I’ve also seen unsubstantiated claims online positing that there was some mass-reporting of the video going on, which caused some sort of algorithmic suppression to kick in.
Long story short: There definitely was an issue. YouTube has confirmed there was an issue, without coming out and saying it was a bug of some sort. But the statement from YouTube below does make clear that the Trump episode was not being surfaced in response to YouTube search queries where it should have been.
“WRT Joe Rogan/Pres.Trump interview and YT search results: 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.”
The bottom line is that the issue should be fixed now. But don’t get me started on the frequency with which these bugs seem to hit one particular side of the political spectrum.
