Joe Rogan recently argued in an episode of JRE that online bots can create artificial outrage, distort public opinion, and make people believe that a movement is larger or more genuine than it actually is.
Discussing comments posted beneath a New York Times Instagram article, Rogan said, “Then you also have opinions that are inside this ecosystem that aren’t even real. These are bots. Like, you there’s so many bots.”
He described seeing numerous accounts repeating the same claim about Elon Musk, while many of the profiles had no public posts, were private, and used names followed by strings of numbers.
“It’s like a fake outrage account,” Rogan said. “And there’s a thousand of them that are posting on this and it’s all the same thing.”
Cody Tucker described experiencing a similar pattern after posting a video about Henry Ford’s antisemitism and relationship with Germany. According to Tucker, the comments quickly shifted into Holocaust denial, with large numbers of accounts repeating identical claims.
Rogan responded that bots now exist at different levels of sophistication, particularly because of artificial intelligence.
“There are levels of sophistication when it comes to bots,” he said, adding that some accounts are designed to appear like ordinary people. He pointed to profiles featuring family pictures, cars, and simple captions, saying that operators can make a page seem like a real person.
Rogan warned that the technology could eventually become difficult to distinguish from genuine human activity.
He said, “Eventually it’s going to be exmachina type, you know, levels of sophistication where you’re not going to be able to discern whether or not it’s a real person commenting or not.”
The concern he said is that a relatively small investment could influence people who are only casually following an issue.
“You could start a bot campaign fairly cheaply and have a bunch of people think, ‘Oh my god, people are really mad at Cody Tucker.’”
He added, “You could really have people’s and you could shift a lot of the casuals who are just barely paying attention. You could shift their perception on you.”
Rogan’s conclusion was direct: “I think bots should be illegal.”
He acknowledged that removing bots is complicated because anonymity can protect whistleblowers. Still, he argued that social media companies should do more to identify coordinated fake accounts and reduce their reach.
“It does artificially alter public opinion on things,” Rogan said. He also described bot activity as part of a wider pattern of manufactured outrage and manufactured fandom, arguing that online popularity is not always authentic.
