On Friday, Spotify silently removed over 70 episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast from its platform as the company continues to face pressure to censor and deplatform Rogan because of his open dialogue and discussions that have been falsely labeled as ‘misinformation’ by washed-up, triggered leftists like Neil Young.
The revelation comes just one day after Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek expressed support for the popular comedian in a company town hall, defending the platform’s decision to work with Rogan and telling employees that it’s not the company’s job to censor or control the content of its creators.
Ek explained:
“I want to remind everyone of our mission. We want to get to 50 million creators and a billion users, and to be a true platform and achieve this ambition, it’s really critical that creators are able to use their voice independently. And it’s also critical that we have diverse voices on our platform.
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“We’re not in the business of dictating the discourse that these creators want to have on their shows.”
Despite the CEO’s statements, fan-made website JREMissing spotted that dozens of episodes were pulled from the platform on Friday after using Spotify’s API to compare currently available episodes to a database of all JRE podcast episodes.
In just one day, the website flagged 73 episodes that were purged from the platform, including podcasts featuring popular comedians and public figures like Tom Segura, Jim Norton, Bill Burr, Pete Holmes, Theo Von, and Gad Saad, among others.
According to CNET:
“CNET confirmed that the episodes newly reported as missing weren’t available on Spotify anymore. The Company and Rogan didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.”
Gizmodo also confirmed the findings of JREMissing after “manually checking” for the missing episodes.
The vast majority of now-censored episodes appear to have been recorded before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. One of the first to realize the new takedowns was the popular author and podcaster, Michael Malice, who shared the news to his Twitter on Friday.
Both of his appearances on JRE have now been removed from the platform.
In all, there are now 113 episodes that are unavailable on Spotify after Friday’s purge, but the highly controversial episode with Dr. Robert Malone that kicked off the current controversy surrounding Rogan is still available on the platform… for now.
If you haven’t had a chance to check out the full 3+ hour podcast with Dr. Malone, the highlights are available below.