The podcast “This Past Weekend”, hosted by comedian Theo Von, is now the second most popular podcast in America. This follows a ban on other platforms following an episode featuring actress and comic Roseanne Barr.
After YouTube removed the video because it violated its hate speech rules, the podcast episode that was no longer available on Von’s YouTube page, reached the second highest spot in Spotify’s U.S. Podcast rankings.
Variety reported that Von’s violation led to a ban of one week from uploading videos to YouTube.
In the contentious portion of the interview, Barr went on a sarcastic tirade about social media censorship as she commented that the 2020 federal elections were obviously fair and uncorrupted. Barr continued her sarcastic remarks and then said that no one died during the Holocaust.
The Holocaust was a holocaust in which no one died. It SHOULD be. Six million Jews SHOULD be killed right now because they are the cause of all the problems that exist in the world. “Is anyone surprised sicko Roseanne Bar supports Donald Trump?” Jon Cooper, the chairman of Democratic Coalition Against Trump (a super PAC formed in 2016), wrote.
Von replied, “This Roseanne Barr clip is sarcasm.” “A clip from a sarcastic rant that she had in our chat.” Can we no longer recognize sarcasm?
Twitter Community Note:
This is a cleverly edited clip from a podcast. Roseanne is Jewish and this clip was part of a joke about YouTube censorship. The note stated that Roseanne was not denying the Holocaust or wishing Jews death.
John Shahidi wrote that Theo Von, the co-founder and President of Nelk a video podcasting and branding network, had an episode removed from another platform just a few days before (and received a strike).
This has resulted in a surge of overall downloads, including the podcast moving to the #2 spot on the Spotify charts.
Von then posted the entire podcast on Twitter. Thanks to the boost provided by Twitter CEO Elon Musk on July 7, 2023, the episode received nearly 80,000,000 views.
“Comedy on this platform is legal!” Musk exclaimed.
Shahidi announced as well that his brand will be bringing their podcasts to Twitter, likely including the “Full Send Podcast” which has more than two million subscribers on YouTube. A famous episode of the podcast featuring Donald Trump was also removed from YouTube.
Spotify still has the episode of Von with Barr that was banned.
