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Has YouTube Shadow Banned Joe Rogan?
Scrolling through the recent results Trending on YouTube, you could be forgiven for thinking that those videos are ones getting the most attention in the least amount of time.
After all, that is the definition of trending, and Joe Rogan is a perennially trending topic.
So why didn’t his End Of The World 2 U.S. Election Show become a trending topic?

Let’s compare that live stream with current trending livestreams…
First, we have Live Streams from Fox News and NBC News that are currently pulling numbers of just 42 thousand views and 36 thousand views. These are very low numbers compared to the live stream of Joe Rogan’s election show, which pulled a low of 200 thousand views and highs of 600 to 800 thousand views, surpassing YouTube Originals’ own “Dear Class of 2020” video which had a high of 600k concurrent views.
Now, let’s compare Joe Rogan’s live stream with current trending videos that weren’t broadcast live…
If I first remove the local Australian Region Trending results, here is what we get.
Top of the trending table is a video by Brad Mondo with “Charli D’Amelio Gets A Mondo Makeover” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrM4_kM1d1o. That video got 4.4 million views in 24 hours, which is a well below 2/3rds of Rogan’s 7.9 million views in 24 hours.
Next is BBC News with “Election Results: Tight Battle In Key States”. 1.4 Million views in 24 hours.
3rd is WadZee with “I Made One Of EVERY BEACON in Minecraft Hardcore”. also 1.4 million views in 1 day. Also a small fraction of Rogan’s numbers.
4th is Lachlan with “MY FORTNITE SKIN REVEAL!” with 3.1 million views in 1 day.
Need I say more? Probably, but anymore that I said would only underpin the point that since the Spotify Deal none (if I’m wrong about it being none, it’s still very few)of Rogan’s videos have trended, despite doing bigger numbers and getting more attention than almost every other trending video, despite consistently doing the most numbers certainly of any comedy channel and almost certainly of any podcast.
This all leads me to my final question which is this:
Are we seeing an honest representation of the videos that are really trending on YouTube, or is this just another example of fake news and bias in big social and the media?
