Joe Rogan is doing some serious damage control for his recent podcast with the Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. After the podcast started to receive heavy backlash for its softball interview style and failing to properly address the issue of social media censorship, Rogan posted a response saying that he felt like he’d got all the information he could from Dorsey. Now Rogan seems to have changed his mind and has announced that Dorsey will be returning to the podcast to discuss social media censorship in more detail.
Here’s the the update Rogan posted to Instagram:
Good news for everyone that was annoyed that we didn’t cover censorship and deplatforming enough on the podcast with Jack Dorsey because he’s offered to come back on again. I’m going to take the criticism to heart and research all the high profile cases on the right and on the left and any instances that might be viewed as double standards. Anything in particular you think is important please leave a mention in the comments and I’ll have someone make a list.
One thing I really liked that Jack said was that he felt that the ability to communicate online was a right that we all should have. Maybe there can be a road to redemption for people that have been banned? I’ll keep you folks posted as to when we work out the details and the date.
Many users have become frustrated with Twitter for having no consistent standards when banning users from its platform. For example, the Infowars host Alex Jones was banned from Twitter for confronting a journalist who had lobbied social media companies to get his accounts closed, yet the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan was allowed to remain on Twitter despite comparing Jews to termites in a tweet.
Rogan seemed to skirt around these issues on his first podcast with Dorsey. When asked about the Alex Jones ban, Dorsey said, “I’m not sure what the actual violations were.” Rogan didn’t press him to provide more details or highlight that Dorsey seemed very familiar with Alex Jones’ Twitter activity and had previously tweeted about why the company wasn’t banning Alex Jones just one month before he was eventually banned.
Hopefully, the second podcast with Dorsey will really dig into the issues of social media censorship and perhaps even lead to the road to redemption for previously banned Twitter users that Rogan references.
