Rumble Donald Trump, Peter Thiel, and other prominent conservatives support the company’s efforts to build a “new Internet” that is independent of Silicon Valley’s giants.
Red Pill News and the X22 Report are no longer available on YouTube. After major tech and social media companies began to purge accounts spreading the QAnon conspiracy theory, the far-right online shows were removed in the fall 2020.
You can find them both on Rumble, a video-sharing platform where their content is among the most popular.
- Red Pill News and X22 Report posted videos claiming Judge Ketanji Jackson was too lenient with child sexual abusers, while Republicans launched a misleading attack against her. Red Pill News, Red Pill News, and the X22 Report posted videos claiming President Biden’s nomination to the Supreme Court was enough proof that a cabal pedophiles controlled the highest levels of government. This belief is held by QAnon followers.
- In a Wednesday episode, the host of X22 Report, with more than half a billion Rumble subscribers, urged his viewers to “Think about bigger picture”. People are learning about pedophilia right now. People are hearing this and seeing how these people think. They’re trying to normalize it.
- Rumble saw the episode almost 220,000 times in one day. Rumble has seen explosive growth since Trump supporters and conservatives adopted it after the 2020 election. Its users and financial backers view it as the next frontier in social media — a network created by and for them that allows virtually any content to be shared.
- Rumble’s chief executive pitches his company, which is located in Toronto, as an “immune form cancel culture.” He has secured tens of million dollars of financing from right-of center entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel. Mr. Trump also entered into an agreement for Rumble to provide Truth Social with the technology support and operational assistance it needed.
- Rumble, once more well-known for its viral videos of kittens and toddlers, now has 44 million monthly visitors according to analytics firm Similarweb. This gives it a wider reach than other top destinations for conservative news content like Breitbart Newsmax, Newsmax, and The Daily Wire. Rumble had a revenue of more than $6.5million in the first nine months last year according to the most recent financial information. However, it was not profitable. After merging with a special-purpose acquisition company, Rumble has stated that it plans to trade publicly in the middle of next year.
The spread of misinformation and falsehoods
The Pelosi Misinformation Loop. We observed how prominent Republican figures amplified baseless and often homophobic claims regarding the attack on Paul Pelosi.
Is there a new misinformation hub? TikTok is seeing a rise in misleading edits, fake news stories, and deepfake photos of politicians.
Russian Falsehoods – Kremlin conspiracies blaming West for disrupting global food supply have made it into right-wing chat rooms in the United States and mainstream conservative media outlets in the United States.
Education focuses on Media Literacy: Students spend more time online and educators are trying to give them tools and strategies to avoid falling for false narratives.
Rumble’s story is instructive for both the sides of the heated debate about how to balance the right to free speech and the increasing threat of disinformation to the stability of countries around the world. Rumble is a welcome alternative to those who believe that Google and Facebook algorithms can be blunt and poorly used for controlling discourse. However, it is imperfect. Rumble is a dangerous loophole for those who worry that technology companies and lawmakers are not doing enough to control false and fabricated information in advance of the next presidential election.
Angelo Carusone is president of Media Matters. He said that Rumble has a very important aspect that people don’t appreciate. Mr. Carusone stated that the hard work involved in convincing Facebook, Google, and Twitter to be more aggressive in policing fake or inciting content kept a lot of it out of reach for a wider audience.
He said, “Rumble basically alters that game.”
Chris Pavlovski is Rumble’s chief executive. He said that he didn’t set out to create a platform for right-wing content when he created it in 2013. He said that Rumble was an alternative to the way Google and other tech companies promoted the content of select influencers a decade ago.
“There is no ideology. In fact, we are neutral. This was Mr. Pavlovski’s statement last month in an interview with a popular Rumble content creator.
He spoke in lofty and virtuous terms about his mission. He said, “We are not a movement which stifles, censors or punishs creativity,” when he announced Rumble’s plans for public disclosure. He has also criticized social media companies and search engine companies such as DuckDuckGo. This Google alternative was popularized on the right. It angered some users by saying it would steer people away form sites that promote misinformation about Russia’s invasion in Ukraine. On Twitter, Mr. Pavlovski stated that he had removed the app from his smartphone.
Rumble’s vision of online speech democratization has largely appealed to the right. This includes many extremists who use Rumble accounts to denigrate vaccines, minimize the human toll from Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, and question the legitimacy or the 2020 election. Even those of fringe beliefs cannot deny the fact that online censorship is inconsistent and unpredictable.
It is possible to reach a large audience. However, those who read far-right content online warn that it has grown into a powerful political tool for Mr. Trump’s supporters and conservatives.
Denver Riggleman (a former Republican congressman who was an intelligence analyst and is currently working with the congressional commission investigating the attack on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2001) said, “It’s already succeeded – this alternate universe has already blossomed.”
Interview requests were not answered by Mr. Pavlovski or Rumble representatives.
- He made it clear to Rumble creators, and others, that his ambitions go beyond increasing traffic to his app and website. Pavlovski, who has received investments from Big Tech critics like Mr. Thiel described a vision of building a “new Internet” — an alt-web completely different from the dominant players.
- Rumble already has its own cloud infrastructure and video streaming capability. This gives it and its partners more independence from Amazons and Microsofts, and also the assurance that they won’t be shut off if any of these providers pull the plug on them.
- Parler’s experience as a social media network is a big part of Rumble’s history. It was shut down by Amazon after it stated that it would not host the site on its computing service.
- Trump’s promise of autonomy from tech giants prompted Rumble to provide cloud services and technology for Truth Social. Truth Social has struggled to be fully operational on its feet. Trump announced the partnership in December by stating that he chose Rumble as a service provider because it “does not discriminate against political ideology.”
- Rumble also has exclusive agreements with content creators that are popular beyond Trump supporters and conservatives, like Glenn Greenwald, a journalist who is vocal about his belief in the technology giants and mainstream media having too much power to suppress speech. Rumble gave the example of its content neutral approach by highlighting its partnership with Mr. Greenwald. Rumble does not tolerate anything that is racist, violent or violates the law.
- There are also popular Rumble creators that the company doesn’t mention in news releases. Alex Jones, Infowars, was banned from YouTube in 2018, but now has over 100,000 Rumble fans.
- This is a tiny number when compared to the millions of YouTube users who have followed Jones. Jones has promoted bogus theories that Mr. Jones orchestrated the Sandy Hook massacre as part of a government plot for firearm confiscation.
- Â People who study right-wing media ecosystems say it is hard to determine the size of the overall audience for hardright content. This is due to the fact that traffic data for individual sites does not include overlap from users who visit more than one site.
- Yochai Benkler is a Harvard Law School professor and co-author of a book on how conservative outlets reinforce their messages by repetition and shut down dissident voices. He said that Rumble is a platform where the audience is larger than the paper size.
- He said that all of his skepticism about how many people are wrong bumps up against the fact” that millions more people voted Trump than watched Fox News. “So there is something going on.”
- Dan Bongino is a pro-Trump host, former Secret Service agent and host of Rumble. He streams his daily show to over 2.2 million subscribers on Rumble. The path of Mr. Bongino to Rumble demonstrates the inherent difficulties in policing conspiracy theories and misinformation.
YouTube began to crack down on Mr. Bongino in the fall 2020 after he violated its policies that were meant to stop false stories about coronavirus.
After YouTube stopped Mr. Bongino collecting ad revenues from the site, Bongino announced that he would be taking an equity stake and making Rumble his preferred video platform. He stated that he needed a home. “We need somewhere to stay where conservative views will not be discriminated against.”
As Mr. Trump refused the loss and YouTube blocked videos that supported his false claims of voter fraud, other people joined Rumble’s boat, including One America News.
Rumble’s OAN partnership was announced by Mr. Pavlovski on the same day. He stated that his company would not censor such political speech. He stated, “Rumble won’t adopt a policy such as this,” citing a unimpeachable inspiration: Galileo who was accused of heresy by Roman Catholic Church for his belief that the Earth revolves around the sun.
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