After coming under fire for featuring vaccine misinformation on his show a year ago, Joe Rogan last week briefly featured information about a bogus vaccine on his podcast. The discussion was based on what turned out to be a fake message on Twitter, which Rogan apparently did not realize was a hoax. Once he found out, a portion of Wednesday’s episode was edited out of The Joe Rogan Experience.
“The show was already out, so we initially decided to post a notice saying we got tricked, then later thought it best to just delete it from the episode,” Rogan wrote in an apology on Twitter. “My sincere apologies to everyone, especially the person who got hoaxed,” he said.
Spotify has flagged both Wednesday and Thursday’s shows with links to accurate information about COVID vaccines.
It was a year ago that Rogan came under fire for spreading misinformation about vaccines on his podcast. That led Spotify to add COVID content advisory labels to more than 1.4 million podcasts on its app where the words “coronavirus” or “pandemic” appear in the metadata of an episode, including its title. That long list includes Rogan’s show. The label sends users to a list of other podcasts that have dug into the facts and effects of the pandemic as well as the CDC website.
To the frustration of some of Rogan’s critics, Spotify has stood by the host while also making its platform rules publicly available for the first time. Still, several podcasts and musicians pulled their content off the app.
Spotify did pull down more than 100 episodes of Rogan’s podcast last February after a video circulated on social media showing his repeated use of the N-word on his show. Rogan apologized, but said the bad press also boosted his podcast’s subscriber numbers.
Spotify has a reported $200 million deal that gives it exclusive rights to The Joe Rogan Experience which expires later this year.
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