[bourgoin]

I did a rough tally of the 70 removed episodes:

Comedian: 45, Political Commentator/Media Personality: 8, Brian Redban: 5, Health/Fitness: 2, Scientist: 2, Author: 2, Musician: 1, Pornstar: 1, (MMA) Fight Companion: 1, Giorgio Tsoukalos, Kevin Smith, Cliffy B & Johnny Cristo (can't even figure out who these last two are)

[ofou]

They've removed comedians mostly because they talk about "sensitive" issues openly and without taboos, oftentimes politically incorrect and careless: ex. transgender and alike themes. Isn't this what comedy should be like? [1]

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UHr5baraKo

[sascha_sl]

Comedy is not equal to being offensive. Being offensive is not itself comedy.

Some comedy is offensively misinformed and still legitimately funny at the same time (e.g. Chapelle had some parts that made me chuckle, and some parts where I dreaded stereotypes about me being reinforced). But some is just bad. Look at Steven Crowder doing "comedy" for instance.

That aside, I'd rather they had removed Abigail Shrier, who is not a comedian but an author of a book full of falsehoods and anecdotes that contributes to a hateful environment that has measurably increased violence against LGBT+ people (up ~100% in the past 5 years in the UK). Or at least for the JRE to have ANY trans person providing different context. Chelsea Manning would be amazing, but I'm not sure if she'd be interested either.

[ofou]

You're right it's not the same, but the same thing with Gervais's presentation, for some it's offensive, for some hilarious. I support comedy in general, not cancel culture though.

[sascha_sl]

There needs to be a balance of interests. I don't know where the line is and I don't want to set it, but misrepresenting minorities to the point you're furthering their marginalization is beyond the line.

There's a lot of nuance lost upon invoking "cancel culture" ("So you've been publicly shamed" is the one piece of media that seems to successfully avoid doing so), and I generally dislike the term because it is often used either in offhand comments by people who don't see the issue or by free speech absolutists that disagree the paradox of tolerance even exists.

That aside, invoking false stereotypes doesn't generally make for exceptional comedy.

[FeteCommuniste]

Some of them are really baffling. Tom Segura, Bert Kreischer, Ian Edwards? Tim Ferris?

[yannikyeo]

Likely delete out of requests by the guests.

[imgabe]

Segura and Kreischer at least are good friend with Rogan and have been on multiple times. I think it's unlikely they would request to be removed.

[no_butterscotch]

I see a lot of speculating like this and if you know these people you know they wouldn't have requested it.

Michael Malice had 2 of his episodes pulled and just did a YouTube about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-1MHKIRUow. He did not request them to be removed and Joe did not either.

It's likely given that the episodes with Robert Malone (the controversial MRNA Vaccine creator) is still up that these recent take-downs are the result of some new algorithmic reviewer.

People on Reddit for instance have noted that many of these episodes talked about race and may have used racial epithets or alluded to race-based issues somehow and may have gotten automatically flagged or some such.

[sva_]

Many of the deleted guests still have other episodes that are up. So it doesn't seem to make sense.

[tinco]

If that's true then why wouldn't Spotify say so? It's not a good look for them that they're just gone.

[YATA0]

Stop repeating this misinformation. Many of the "deleted" guests still have other episodes that are up.

[killingtime74]

Maybe they are having trouble paying their S3 bill

[scruple]

The Louis Theroux one really throws me off.

[robbedpeter]

Ooh, conspiracy time, it's scientologists pulling the strings!

[stevehawk]

real chance these were done due to jokes that aren't woke/pc more than vax related

[bartimus]

Just checked: Tom Segura is still there. Kreischer, Ian edwards too.

[flippinburgers]

Bill Burr?

[Method-X]

I heard comedians have a hard time doing shows on University campuses these days. The huge amount of comedian episodes being removed seems consistent with that trend.

[trog]

Having worked with computers before, the explanation I am leaning to based on zero evidence is that there is a bug somewhere, possibly in the tool used to make the determination about which episodes have been 'removed'

[speeder]

Cliffy B could be the game designer.