Joe Rogan Is Mainstreaming Right-Wing Misinformation

The “Joe Rogan” experience is off the cuff, unedited, and very often entirely off the rails. Alex Patterson of Media Matters says the podcast is “a bastion of toxic masculinity… that leads listeners further down rightwing rabbit holes,” and notes that Rogan’s “dedicated listeners are mostly young men… listening to all three hours and taking in completely unfounded conspiracy theories without any of the fact-checking that would come for a more traditional journalistic enterprise.” Plus, Samuel Woolley, the author of The Reality Game: How the Next Wave of Technology Will Break the Truth and the director of the Propaganda Lab at the University of Austin’s Center for Media Engagement, explains why “the right is a lot better than the left at leveraging the internet and leveraging both organic engagement and inorganic engagement to megaphone out their content,” including by using networked propaganda, where “what begins on social media as a quote unquote organic phenomenon, which is oftentimes not organic, then ends up on cable news, then back on social media and so on and so forth until it's really unclear where it came from.”

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