TheQuartering [8/22/2022]
They vanished into the virtual void.
Eagle-eyed fans have pointed out that dozens of episodes of Joe Rogan’s controversial podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience” have disappeared from Spotify this week — which the entertainment platform has attributed to a digital glitch.
“Spotify is aware of this technical issue, and we are looking into it now,” a Spotify spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times. The digital disappearance was revealed by JRE Missing, an automated watchdog that keeps tabs on Rogan’s episodes.
Per the site, the glitch affected a whopping 36 episodes, which were reportedly recorded before the podcast purveyor acquired the show — including its catalog of past episodes — in 2020 for an estimated $200 million.
Naturally, the phenomenon might seem suspect given Spotify’s history of surreptitiously deleting “JRE” episodes over controversial content.
However, the latest batch seemed to have been Houdini’d at random as they featured a grab bag of guests, including Republican Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw, former Democratic Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, as well as musicians Post Malone and Everlast; and comedians Eddie Izzard and Bryan Callen, the LA Times reported.
In the past, the Swedish streaming giant had purposefully purged over 100 episodes of the podcast, many of which featured prominent far-right figures and conspiracy theorists.