Tag: censorship

Spotify Continues to Remove Joe Rogan Episodes — 42 Shows Now Deleted

Spotify is continuing to remove episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience as part of their $100 million exclusive relationship, with more nixed shows discovered this week.

Just last week, Digital Music News first reported that 40 different Joe Rogan Experience podcast episodes were found missing from Spotify, now the exclusive platform for the show. Now, that number has quickly grown to 42, with potentially more shows quietly getting removed from the catalog.

Among the newly-missing is an episode (#411) with Bulletproof Coffee founder Dave Asprey, a frequent guest on The Joe Rogan Experience. Strangely, Spotify has deleted three total episodes with Asprey for reasons that aren’t entirely clear.

One explanation for the removals is that Asprey frequently backs controversial anti-aging and scientific theories, including claims that Bulletproof Coffee is extremely healthy while other coffee brands are not. Asprey has designed the ‘Bulletproof Diet,’ and frequently criticizes coffee manufacturers for leaving high levels of damaging mycotoxins in their blends.

Asprey — who has predicted that he will live to the age of 180 — is certainly unconventional in his theories, though it appears that Spotify has decided to debunk his claims by removing his episodes entirely.

Also suddenly missing is a ‘Live from the Icehouse’ episode (#149) featuring Joe Rogan and Little Esther, Al Madrigal, Josh McDermitt, Brendon Walsh, Felicia Michaels, and Brian Redban. That sounds like a fun time, though perhaps one-too-many raunchy jokes were tossed around in the episode. Indeed, the episode may have simply contained one objectionable joke — but that was enough for Spotify’s editors to hit delete and remove the show entirely.

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Sharyl Attkisson on Combatting Censorship: ‘Don’t Be Kowtowed Into Not Speaking Out’

Investigate journalist Sharyl Attkisson says combatting censorship in today’s media and big tech landscape requires Americans to “speak up” and stand firm against people and groups that seek to silence them.

“I think the most important single thing people can do is to speak up and not be bullied by the people that want to keep the voices silent so that it appears, in this artificial world that we live in online, that everybody’s on the same page and everybody thinks the same thing and this is okay,” Attkisson told The Epoch Times’ American Thought Leaders program.

“Don’t be kowtowed into not speaking out. Don’t act like that’s okay.”

Attkisson, author of “The Smear,” has been researching how information has been controlled in the United States, particularly by political and corporate interest groups. She said these groups began ramping up their efforts to control information once Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election. But these groups, she argued, began realizing Americans were not “getting on board” with their messaging and, as a result, started to act out of desperation.

“The reason they’re being so heavy-handed about information and access is because people are not getting on board with what they’re supposed to think and do. They’re not acting the way they’re supposed to act after their information is controlled. And I think it was very frightening for them to see,” she said.

“As I said, they almost entirely controlled the media landscape in 2016 but Trump still won the election. How did that happen? Well, they blamed the internet.”

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The ‘Dangerous Speech Project’: The Swamp’s Newest Censorship Project

You’ve heard of “hate speech.” Now introducing a new way to demonize free speech: The Dangerous Speech Project.

Birthed from the bloated bowels of US academia is a cottage industry of speech suppression on behalf of the corporate state.

It rolls out new pseudo-woke virtue-signaling campaigns whenever it gets the chance — the bread and butter of overpaid academics. Mortgages don’t pay themselves.

Enter the Dangerous Speech Project, which ostensibly claims to want to make speech “safer.” It is the brainchild of Susan Benesch, faculty associate at Harvard’s “Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society” and an esteemed Ivy League “Scholar of Speech.”

The project defines “dangerous speech” as “any form of expression (speech, text, or images) that can increase the risk that its audience will condone or participate in violence against members of another group.” Yet, Benesch and comrades offer no way to objectively measure that increased risk of violence.

“Dangerous speech” as a social science concept conveniently lacks any way to objectively measure its applicability in any given real-world situation. This leaves the interpreting to the whims of the censor – perfect for Silicon Valley technocrats (more on that later).

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YouTube bans independent Italian media outlet Byoblu

In yet another crackdown on independent media and creators, YouTube has removed the channel of Byoblu – an independent Italian media outlet that had more than 525,000 subscribers.

The popular channel had uploaded more than 2,000 interviews to YouTube in its 14+ years on the platform and racked up over 200 million total video views. It featured interviews with magistrates, presidents of the Constitutional Court, politicians, lawyers, scientists, and more.

YouTube deleted Byoblu’s channel after targeting it numerous times over its coverage of protests and interviews with scientists.

According to Byoblu, YouTube had removed several unpublished videos of demonstrations in Cesena and Milan, removed a video discussing a leading British Medical Journal columnist’s thoughts about the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, removed a months-old video featuring an interview with a senior scientist from the University of Siena because he talked about the benefits of vitamin C, demonetized the channel, and removed 5,000 of the channel’s subscribers before it was permanently suspended.

Byoblu added that YouTube’s final action against the channel before permanently suspending it was to remove a September 2020 video of a street demonstration where the Pan-African activist Mohamed Konare spoke.

In a post about YouTube’s takedown of the channel, Byoblu suggested that it was targeted by YouTube because of its obsession with wanting ordinary people to speak and showing the news from an alternative point of view.

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Facebook says even content “in the voice of Donald Trump” is banned, deletes major interview

Facebook removed a video interview of President Trump with his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, a Fox News contributor. The social media company said that any content representing the “voice” of Donald Trump will not be allowed on Facebook’s main platform and Instagram.

On Tuesday, Lara uploaded a photo on Instagram of her sitting across from the former president, calling on followers to watch the interview that night.

Shortly after posting the image, a Facebook staff sent Trump officials an email warning that content “in the voice of President Trump is not currently allowed on our platforms (including new posts with President Trump speaking).”

The email further warned that such content “will be removed if posted, resulting in additional limitations on accounts that posted it.”

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